Monday 25 May 2009

mac and pc...can't we all just get along?

Finished the final cut today. Woo hoo. To celebrate I had a nice cup of tea.
I'm having compatability issues due to my lack off mac vs pc knowledge. It's a major frustration when everything is done but the accepted format for submission is .avi which my mac doesn't acknowledge. The mac vs pc adverts make it look like they just throw snide comments at each other...they should change the adverts to a UFC style cage fight, it would be a better representation of the lack of communication
A quick round-up of the last week. I spent Wednesday and Thursday filming the title and credits. Spelling words with string is not as easy as it might sound, and I spent about 5 hours stitching the copyright words, but it worked ok. There's a lot of flicker on the footage but it looks handmade and I don't mind it.
Friday I fiddled around in After Effects until I learned how to paint out the rigging, which I think looks alright but I'll reserve judgement until I see it on a projector. Friday afternoon Gareth came in to uni to record the banjo track. We spent about an hour and a half setting up and then working through the story to fit the music he'd already composed to the extended film. To be honest he did it all. I didn't need to give much input as I liked everything he did. It was interesting to watch his progress with each take.
Then until today I've been editing it all together. It's final running time is 2min52secs. Quite a bit longer than the original 90 seconds. I'm concerned with the image quality at the final export as I haven't compressed anything yet from the original HD image but the Quicktime movie looks a bit pixely. I can only put it down to the fact that I put a slight vignette on it. Also the volume is quieter than I'd expected, but the levels are right so I don't think I can do anything about that now.
Anyway, no time for a rest, on with the work for the degree show.