Post Production

                Now that you have your project scripted and shot you are almost done right? Wrong. Sorry to break it to you but you are just getting started, good news though if you did a thorough enough job in the first two steps your remaining work will be a little bit easier, but if you did a bad job in the first two steps, well we’ll get to that.  Post production is what you have on your plate now, or in layman’s terms editing. Editing is a simple enough process, but there are certain decisions that will make a difference when preparing to edit such as how you plan to upload your footage to a computer (will you use a converter box or will you just upload it straight from your memory card), what music or sounds you will include (make sure it is ‘royalty free’ to avoid copyright infringement) and what program you will use to edit it.

                I learned to edit on Final Cut Express. Final Cut is a Macintosh OSX Exclusive program which means it isn’t available for computers that use a PC operating system. Final Cut is the industry standard for editing, its professional grade, editors of TV shows, movies and commercials use it to assemble their projects.  In Final Cut there are so many different things you can do it’d be impossible to condense it all to one blog post, you can slice footage, add hundreds of visual effects, change light levels, change audio levels, record audio, manage several projects at once, create text animation (for credits and labels), and about a thousand other tasks. Though it’s a bit pricey (about two hundred dollars) it is definitely a program worth buying if you are really interested in video production. If you would rather not spend te money though there are free (legal) alternatives such as Windows Movie Maker for PC and IMovie for MAC.  Below I have included a link to the website containing some of the tutorials that I used to learn many of the techniques I use in Final Cut (I also found ones for Moviemaker and  Imovie).  These tutorials taught me more than I could have learned on my own by just playing around in Final Cut, and though they are a tad boring at times, they are worth watching.