Bsc Digital Arts and Technology

With the clips all edited or at least the ones I needed to do, it’s time to work on the database, it shouldn’t take me too long to make as it’s only going to be a simple database that you can add files to and edit them etc.

 There’ll be one table with the list of all the movies in with the fields Appearence Order, Clip Number, Title, Emotion 1, Emotion 2, Emtion 3, Start Frame, End Frame and Length.

 This would make it easier for anyone to take the final footage/clips and know where to find it the film without having to watch it all and take pieces by stopping and starting it.

 Once the table was made I could enter all the Data, I could only fill in the first 6 fields (as the start and end time wasn’t yet avaliable) and only the 22 clips that we’ll be using for the presentation.
 I sent the finished database to Ollie so he could fill in the details of the clips we had that aren’t being used, and then send it over to Kat and Claudia to fill the last 3 fields of the table.

 Just waiting for Kat and Claudia to finish editing all the clips together to see the final thing.

Another early start for me, as the group was again meeting at 3. Ollie was stressing out a bit because he thought I’d never get all the clips edited in time and sent over for Thursday (don’t see why I had faith in myself)
 But I understood his concern as the last I spoken to him I hadn’t been able to compress the files any smaller than the in the 100 MB’s size.
 In the end we chose as a group that I’d edit half of the clips and Kat and Claudia will edit the other half and editting them all together in the random order that was chosen using the code that Ollie wrote last term.

 It would also enable me to concentrate on getting the database sorted so I could send that over for them to finish filling out with the frame details of each clip.

 I had 7 clips that needed to be edited and I did them without a problem (and I would have had time to do the others two but Ollie didn’t want me to), I uploaded them onto Ollie’s FTP site and they downloaded them and had all the clips to put together the final version.

As everyone (accept myself) was back in Plymouth today they decided to meet up to make sure everyone is clear on what has been done, what needs to be done and what each one of us will be doing in the days leading up to the presentation on Thursday.

 The time was agreed for them to meet at 3, which meant 10am my time, that also meant I had to make sure I was up lol. 
  Claudia agreed about what me, Kat and Ollie had discussed on MSN a few days before, and was ready to put together the list of clips that I had already cut down.

It took ages for Ollie to upload the clips (as he could only do it from Babbage and not at home) I eventually got the clips about 3 hours later (downloaded and all saved) so I was able to finally begin my editing.

 First I watched all of the clips then decided which ones would need to be cut down or fiddled with and where that’ll be. I made a note of this on the list that Ollie sent me of the order of the clips and which clips needed we to be used.

 I started playing around with one of the clips to see how I’d save the file, which format it’ll be in and if it’ll be too big to upload onto the FTP site (it was also matter of time how long it’ll take to upload the clips and download them on the other side). 
 Every clip I tried ended up coming out a lot bigger than the original clip, not only if I selected save would it save it as a premier pro project (too big to send over) it was bigger when I exported it. Even as an AVI file it was huge!

 One clip that I tried was 24MB to begin with, afer I had cut some of it down and exported it to AVI it was 172MB! which is a hell of a lot bigger than it should be and doesn’t really make sense.

 I really wanted to do some video editing for this assignment so I was determined to find a way around this problem there had to be a solution!
 I eventually found it, I had to download a converter programe that would convert the AVI file into a MPEG1 file (or Movie Clip) which compressed it further and would be easier to upload and for them to download them in England.
  I did have to go through quite a number of converter programmes to find one that’ll work, as I had a 3GP file that I wanted to convert for another project I had to find one that’ll convert that format. The one that I found and is using is the Xilsoft Video Converter 3.
 Another thing I needed to download which also took time to download, an evening lost of doing work…just hope I have better luck tomorrow.

I have met another set back and that is I can’t download a trial version of that software that I need to edit the clips, I was hoping to use Adobe Premeir Pro and get a free 30 day trial from the Adobe Site.
 But since Creative Suite 3 is coming out shortly they have taking down all of their Creative Suite 2 trials  that they did have, include the Premier Pro trial…so I had no software to edit any clips.
 Without it all I’ll be able to do is the database which doesn’t consist of much and the report which again isn’t a great contribution to the assignment.

 So instead I spent the whole afternoon downloading other software in order to get Premier Pro, so I had to downloaded BitComet a torrent programme thing in order to download other software from people. That took a good part of an hour to download, Ollie found me Premier Pro with the registration key which I could download.
 I did that and it took 2 hours to download, I also needed to burn it onto a disk but I don’t have a programme to do that or a blank disk handy…so I had to download another programme DAEMON Tools which basically did the same as if I had a disk with Premier Pro on it, (it acted as another partition on my hardrive or something like that).

 It only took about 3 or so hours for me to be able to have the programme to work now all I need to do is wait for Ollie to upload the clips for me and with the time difference I’ll have to wait till tomorrow morning to do that.

The e-mail idea didn’t work or didn’t work as well as Ollie and I hoped it would…so in the end we just had to go ahead with something we thought of doing then tell the rest of the group when they got online.

 However just as we were discussing it Kat who is part of our group appeared online so we were able to run our ideas through her and see what she thought of them and agreed.

 What we decided to do was Ollie would give me access to part of his FTP site, and on it he’ll upload the clips he had captured from three older films, as I download them he’ll upload some more all of which are in its own folder.

 I will then work on editting them down and narrowing down which emotion is to be shown, and sort out the sound and everything. I will then upload them onto the FTP in my own folder and then he can download them for the final thing.
 I would also work on the database and putting in the clip details etc.

 In the mean time Kat and Claudia will be working on the clips that I’ve already editted and turn them into the final movie clip, play around with the sound and colour.

It’s been a few days and we’re still no closer to figuring out how we’re going to overcome this minor delay…i.e. what everyone will be doing.

 As can be expected not all the group will be on msn at the same time especially me as I’m five hours behind the others. So far the only people who know of this problem is me and Ollie as the others in the group haven’t been online.

 Ollie and I decided that possibly the best way to communicate to each other is by either a group MSN conversation and make sure that everyone is online and that it’s a time we can all make (i.e. not something like 5 in the morning where I am).

 Or a better option is by a group e-mail that way it doesn’t matter what time you read it as long as it gets round to everyone and everyone agrees on what is said etc.

 So we’re giving that a go an we’ll see what happens, but should hopefully be successful and we’ll each be able to get on with our own specific jobs. 

Something I don’t think any of the group thought of before the easter break was how we were going to transfer the files over to each other.
 Even if all of us worked on only a small amount of clips at one time there was still an issue of the size of each file and being able to send them to each other quickly and easily and not have to wait forever to download them.
 There was a way around it and thats everyone getting their own clips, editting them and then in the final week put them all together if they’re on USB sticks or something, but then I was the problem as I’m in America for that week.

 Which meant it left me to do the database, and the report which to be honest isn’t much that I’d have contributed to the assignment something that I wasn’t too happy about as I didn’t want to leave it to everyone else to do.

 We’re still working out an alternative option where I’d be able to do as much work as the others in the group and still be able to send and recieve clips. 
 Hopefully it won’t be too long before it gets done.

As the laptop that the video would be captured to had a few problems i.e. basically broke on me again part way through I had to “give up” the capturing of it and hand it over to Ollie while I sort it out…I should be able to edit footage though over the holiday.

 We’re just going to have to use new films which are faily easy to get so at least it isn’t a major set back,

Ok so it’s been nearly a month since my last post, this does not mean I haven’t been working on this project.

 As we are now having our Easter Break we needed to divide the project into tasks in order for it to be completed for when we get back.
 We got together on Thursday to discuss who would do what job and how we’d work it, we decided that we’ll each rotate doing each one of the jobs so that everyone can get a chance to work on each role of the project (plus it means the pressure isn’t all on one person to do one thing i.e. edit the footage, do the sound or the database)