Editing Day 4

The only problem I currently have with this course is the fact that I can not take home a laptop to use to edit. I know that this decision comes from people higher up on the managerial totem pole, but I really wish they would change their minds on this decision. If they did, I certainly think that the quality of post-production work would increase. And it would be easier on the students as well. In the current arrangement when editing is only done during class time (or during study halls or after school, but let's just consider the class time for this example). So, each class is 42 minutes long, but when you consider set-up and put-away time of the laptop and extraneous equipment, a student may only have about 30 minutes of actual editing time. In a five day week, that's only a total of 2.5 hours. And plus, when a student starts each day, time is wasted determining exactly where in the editing process the student was etc. Therefore, 2.5 hours is actually less. Oh, and we must consider the fact that the majority of students taking this course are not proficient in final cut express. Sure, it's not that hard to develop a working knowledge of this program, but there is a definite learning curve. And without having more time to spend learning the program itself, it's harder for the student (especially in the allotted time period) to do anything more than the very basics. That doesn't include any visual effects or visual corrections that would enhance the video greatly. If students could take these laptops home, in one weekend a student could easily have ample time to finish the entire project, including time to watch tutorials about final cut express to help with the more advanced aspects of it. (Slightly separately, it would also be nice to be able to spend more time learning about the different functions of the camera itself to help with shooting. There actually is some opportunity for that though since we can check out the camera.) Anyway, it would really be awesome if, in future years, students could check out the laptops. Oh, and also, it's not like the laptops shouldn't be checked out because they are so expensive, because all of the other equipment we check out certainly totals approximately the same amount as the laptop.

Oh, and as to today's work, I did some more editing. Kyle brought in the DVD today. We played that on one Mac and I edited on another so I can see exactly how the scenes fit together and everything.