Evaluation Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing the product?


During the production of our sequence, we used a mixture of different types of hardware and software. The hardware was used in the practical side of filming the piece and the software was used to edit and enhance our sequence.


Hardware:


During the production stage, we used many different types of hardware, some of which I had never used before, such as the cannon DM50 directional stereo microphone. I learnt what each piece was called and what each was used for:

I remembered these pieces of hardware from GCSE Media. However, I had forgotten how to use things such as the Paglight and how to extend the tripod - I ensured that before filming anything I learnt how to confidently use each piece of equipment and I felt I learnt alot from doing this.


All of these things had similar advantages - they were all relatively easy to carry around and nothing was too large. We were careful with the equipment and after the health and safety session at school we were very unlikely to break anything or harm ourselves using anything. A particular piece of equipment that i felt had the most advantages was the tripod - it was easy to fold up, change its levels and carry it around in its case. The battery life on the camera battery was also very good and we never ran out of battery.


The equipment also had disadvantages - we constantly had to be careful with the paglight as the barn doors kept closing, which is a fire hazard so they required lots of attention.


Software:


Learning to use software well was extremely important - we may have filmed our shots but editing a continuous and impressive sequence was going to take time, effort, skill and knowledge of all the software.

This programme was called Adobe Premier Pro CS3. It was the main programme that was used throughout the editing weeks - it was used to capture footage, piece it together, cut it, add transitions, add music etc. We used to basically do almost everything.


There were many advantages of this software - it was easy to use following the lesson on how to use it and we were able to do the majority of our work on it. We were able to create numerous timelines so testing out effects was easy too. However, the disadvantages were that I felt the transitions on offer were fairly basic and we couldn't create titles/credits using it so we had to use the mac instead.

This was the programme on the mac, known as Livetype, which we used to create our titles. It had so many advantages - we were able to choose from a wider variety of fonts and the transitions were much more impressive then on the PC's. I was able to use the programme with ease, despite never having used it before and I feel our titles were successful. The only disadvantage of the programme was that we had to export our titles from the mac to the PC whenever we made them, which took extra time and could get annoying.

This programme was also on the mac and was called Soundtrack Pro. It was really useful as we were able to find a huge library of sound effects on here - we found the sound effects for 'GPH Productions' and 'Heartbeat Films' on here. The advantages were that i found this programme easy to use and it gave us a wide selection of material to choose from. However the disadvantage with this programme was the same as with Livetype - exporting things could get irritating.

Advice to others:

• I'd advise people to have a health and safety session before handling any hardware
• Have sessions using the software experimentally before using it properly
• Constantly press ctrl+s to save work whilst editing to ensure nothing is lost
• If you're ever unsure of anything, ask.