Lights, Camera, Colour?

We were happy that we completed our final cut however we need to take on board our feedback.
In the rough cut they pointed out that the overall colour of the video was a bit bland and dull. We aimed to make our final cut bright and enhanced. Therefore, I listened to a few turorials and found a way in which I can correct the colour, brightness, gamma, saturation; making our music video look so much better (hopefully).

The tutorial that was most helpful was the link below :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLyGDlBnDfwFrom

From I was able to follow the simple instructions into correcting the colour and other effects. We noticed our video looked a bit "washed-out" and too light in places which did not look very professional.

The tools I mostly used in Final cut to correct the colour were:

• Brightness and contrast







• Gamma







• Colour correction
  
  

I have shown evidence of this from the grab shots below:

Below is an example of the difficulties I encountered when sorting out the colour of the video, we needed to get the right balance between the colours and saturation or it could end up worse than we started, being far too saturated...

Music channel?

Previously I have researched into music channels however have not discussed what channel we shall use for our promotional package.

Our genre comes under indie rock and is targetted at 16-25 year old girls and boys therefore the music channel we chose needs to be the correct channel in order to make our promotional package a success.



Here are the possibilities: MTV, MTV HITS, Q, NME AND VH1!!

However before making a decision, I will go onto each one of their websites to see where Bloc Party is most popular. Then I will spend half an hour watching these music channels and find out the videos they air and see if they will attract our target audience.

This first study I looked at was MTV, I have reguarly seen Bloc Party's videos on this channel however still thought it was a good idea to research into their channel.

All I did was type Bloc Party into their search engine and their MTV channel came up. Showing all their videos at the right hand side. I could also view exclusive MTV live videos from festivals such as Oxygen and Reading.

Taking this into account, we placed MTV's logo into final cut to see how it looked this is what we found:

Editing our Final Cut

Editing

Editing is a fundamental part of our coursework and learning from our rough cut problem areas we were determined to make sure we used the appropriate tools in Final cut pro!

In many parts of our video we zoomed in as shown below. This meant we could cut out an background we did not want in our video. As you can see in the right hand clip we didnt want people wandering around the screen therefore simply used the zoom in tool to adjust this.

Split screen

As a group we very much wanted to show the clip of both emily and jake singing with an extreme close up. However, this would mean 2 clips becoming one and were unsure if we were going to be able to achieve this look.
Luckily, we came across a brilliant tutorial that helped us greatly. Here is the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y4FIfRnbvc

This tutorial taught us exactly how to create the split screen in final cut pro.Firstly we had to place the two images we wanted to appear in the same window. We then had to resize the images so they would fit on the same screen- After we did this we then had to render(which will be discussed below).

This is Emily and Vicky working towards our final cut deadline.. busy editing..

When it came to editing it was very important that we used the correct effects and transitions, we didn't want to use loads of different effects because this simply wouldn't go with our lyrics or visuals. However from our research we discovered the use of overlays and cross dissolves and were keen to use them in our editing. As you can see below there are a wide range of effects you can use in final cut pro. We mainly used the Dissolve tool in our project.

When editing we had to remember many different parts to ensure we were using final cut pro properly. One of these aspects was to turn down the audios behind of footage. From where we had filmed there was going to be background noise therefore we needed to make sure we turned down the volume and increase the music.

The most fundamental part of the editing process was in my opinion, remembering to render our footage! Everytime we made an adjustment in final cut we had to render the video and audio to allow it to work and show what we wanted. If we did not render then the video would simply not work. This was very time consuming and sometimes a bit tedious however was the fundamental part of editing.

Editing with colour

Correcting the colour balance became a very important part of our editing process. It could be argued that the video camera we used, the quality was not brilliant. However, this was not a problem because we could change the colour, brightness, contrast and exposure in final cut pro. As you can see above, we were correctly the close up of Emily. We wanted to make the shot less bright and more of a contrast, we found changing the effect very useful so that all our footage looked the same (even though we filmed at different times of the day).

Finishing touches to our final cut

Last adjustments until our final cut...

Although we have now completed our music video and finalized the editing we noticed one thing we needed to add. Due to the repetitive use of flashing images, lights ansd strobe light in our music video it was necessary for us to include a warning sign at the start, ensuring the saftey of our viewers.

This has also been done in exisitng media therefore even more of a reason to follow the conventional expectations.

As you can see below, this is our music video stating that this visdeo contains flashing lights- noticing the red coloured warning. Similarily, in Kayne West's music video the red writing is also shown and more of a description explain that this video may trigger epilepsy and therefore viewers need to take caution.

Editing Rough Cut in Final cut

We decided as a team that the people responsible for editing our video would be Vicky and Emily because they wanted to do this particular part of the process.

At first it did come with its difficulties as final cut is a pretty confusing software, however we were able to overcome this with tutorials.

This is a grab show of our overlays, we found out how to do this on a youtube tutorial. We had to place one part below the other then click the overlay button to place the image under the other one. However, we had to play around with the opacity and decide how visible we wanted it. This grab show shows this process however also shows how we had to render it afterwards so it would work properly.

This grab shot shows the process of cutting the parts we did not want. As you can see in the first screen Emily is very close to Jake however in the second screen she is far away, we wanted to show this quick transition without Emily actually walking away. We did this through the editing screen where we simply cut down the part we did not want. This is very much the bulk of how we edited and was very time-consuming especially because we had to render every change we made.

Overall, we enjoyed working with Final Cut however because we haven't worked with it before we did find it challenging especially because it is time consuming. However, it is good we highlighted this as an issue because we will not make the same mistakes in our Final Cut development. It is a possibility we may have to change video camera because the one we are working with currently is HD therefore is a huge size meaning it is slow in the editing programme. However, we are going to wait until we get our feedback then we will make the necessary changes.