Editing Blog

Hello! Today my group and I finished the editing portion of our project. It took us a very long time to finish our editing mainly because there were so many technological difficulties. The first day that we wanted to start editing, none of the computers had Pinnacle Studios on them. When we finally got a computer that had Pinnacle Studios on it, we were not able to get our footage on it because our flash drive stopped working. Since this happened, we had to go back to the desktop computer that we dumped our footage on to and put our footage on to another flash drive. The desktop computer that we used took a very long time to load and we ended up wasting a lot of time waiting. My group decided to let someone else use the laptop that we were going to use that had Pinnacle Studios on it because we weren't using it at that moment, and we didn’t know how long it would take for the desktop to load and log on to my account. After a very long time, the desktop finished loading and we were able to get our footage onto the flash drive. I was able to find a laptop with Pinnacle Studios on it that was not in use. I logged on to it and we were able to get our footage onto the laptop. 

Another problem occurred with the laptop. When we tried to launch the Pinnacle Studios app, the app wouldn’t respond, only a small white square would show up on the screen. We assumed the app was just loading but after five minutes of waiting we decided to get help. I brought the laptop over to my teacher and asked them if they knew what I could do to solve the problem. They told me to go to a faculty member that specialized in fixing these issues. I gave him the computer and Pinnacle Studios was up and running within a couple of seconds. When I arrived back to my group, we began to import our footage onto Pinnacle Studios. When all our footage was done importing, we looked through all takes to find the best ones to use for our final product. We then organized the takes in the correct order that they need to be in. Before we knew it, the class was over, and we were barely able to get any editing done. 

Today was a professional study day at my school which means students get out early and classes are shorter. We only had around fifty minutes in that class and we still barely even started editing. Right when we got to class, we immediately took a laptop and logged on. When we got onto Pinnacle Studios, we looked at all our footage played together, and it honestly wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, I was actually somewhat impressed with it. The main issue that we noticed first was that the video was a little bit longer than it should be. We then had to slowly look through all the takes and cut out all tiny parts that wasted space. This was a difficult task because we only wanted to get rid of the tiny scenes where it was only silence and we didn’t want to cut out any dialogue. When we reached the goal of the thirty seconds, we watched the commercial again. It looked even better now. We wanted to add in some sound effects for the commercial, but we couldn’t find a working website that could convert a YouTube video to MP3. We asked a friend in another group if he could help us out and he sent us a website that fixed all of our troubles. We added in the sound of a school bell in the first shot so that the location was more clarified. We were going to add the signature Mcdonalds jingle over a shot at the end of the commercial, but we liked the result without better.We didn’t really have a lot to edit since it came out so good the first time around. The project isn’t due until Tuesday so if my group wants to make some last minute changes we still can.