Scene 34 & 37

As part of the course, we were given rushes to edit for two scenes within a film. I found this a mainly enjoyable experience if not a little frustrating at times. I've not really had an awful lot of experience with editing in the past so it took me a while to get my head around the whole process. I've previously used Final Cut 7 to edit my short film for A-level Film Studies but I barely used any of the features available to me.

The software we used to edit these rushes was Final Cut Pro X. The general opinion of the class was that this was a terrible version of Final Cut. They said that most of the processes that were usually fine-tuned manually were set automatically and that the software seemed to do everything for you. For such an editing novice I personally found this to be a great help rather than a disappointment. I especially liked the interface  for selecting parts of the clips to drag onto the timeline.

In terms of sound I found adjusting levels and adding fades an enjoyable experience. I learned about levels and fades in George Flemings Audio post-production lectures. He also taught us about wild tracks and most importantly the sonic identity of a film. I wanted to take this lesson and try and create good quality and clear sound within these edits to the best of my abilities. In the tutorials I was shown the tools available on Final Cut Pro X for audio editing. As much as I enjoyed this I found the features available on this software quite limited as there was a lot more I wanted to do to to the sound but didn't have the means to do so.

As for colour grading, this was a concept I wasn't very aware of before so I found the lecture about this particularly interesting. I was a bit worried at the beginning of the tutorial on colour grading because it seemed quite complicated but the tools on Final Cut Pro X were very simple and easy to use. I found it difficult to decide what looked natural at first but after a while it became easier.