Final Assignment: Editing through the Night

A post before I collapse onto my bed.

My whole group managed to get permission from Mr Dennis Ooi of the CNM department to use the CATI lab through the night for video editing. I ended school at 4pm and started editing from then on.

We have already mixed some of the beatbox sections and have a basic beat based on a metronome to follow. We set the metronome at speed 92 and followed the beats accordingly to put the videos in. After we were done with the beatbox section, we had to start working on the rap section of the video.

To our horror, we realised that 2 of the files were captured to a corrupted format. The file could be viewed on a video player but could not be open in Adobe Premiere Pro. I ran to the MDL to borrow a DV camera and a firewire to do exporting into Zhiyun's laptop because it was near 5pm and the lab was about to close.

At midnight, we managed to get a couple of friends to help with the recording of the voiceover for the rap. We recorded in the playroom because at that time of the night, it was the quietest place to be.

After we were done with recording the voiceover, we continued working on things like green screen removal and touching up of the missing bits on the people due to lighting problems or very bad reflections. I never knew doing manual tracking is such a tedious task. I had to use an extra video mask in order to cover this moving object that shows holes showing the green screen.

After touching up, we experimented with adding background for the videos. Our first issue was with the difference in colour between the background and the subject. As we want our focus to be on the subject, we decided to either tone down the saturation of the background or to blur in totally.

I did some blurred background while my friend tweaked the colour on After Effects. In the end, we decided to go with the desaturated background as the blurred one made the buildings seem unreal and worse, something that our audience, the freshmen, could not relate to.

At about 3am, we were all very very tired. Zhiyun and I both started the day at 9am and was really suffering from severe fatigue at that point of time. The conditions of the room did not help as the room was small and stuffy and at 3am the temperature in the room went up to 32 degrees. The air-conditioning was off because it was centrally controlled. And the door have to be closed if not there will be an alarm. It was just terrible.

But we pulled ourselves together and edited as much of the video as we could.

In the morning, we had a rather satisfactory version of the video, with some ends untied.

I think it was a night well spent. Despite the extreme conditions.