I was a bit disappointed that I had pulled such long hours to get a working version of our project done for the group's benefit (as well as mine of course), and submit it by 10am on Tuesday, missing a couple of bibliography links in my submission, for instance I read an entire book, one of the recommended readings, but being in somewhat of a hurry and dazed by lack of sleep I didn't add it. It was a short book by the way, only 100 pages. That's how I read the whole thing. My written statement which was to discuss the meanings behind our work was in my opinion garbage. It also was less than the word minimum. But I was disappointed because despite my grand efforts to meet the deadline, people in my class were submitting their work well after the deadline, in some instances 12 or 1 pm, maybe later. If I had done that perhaps I could have produced a better statement. I'd definitely have remembered that I read an entire book and noted it. Not that I have any hold any grudges, it's just... annoying.

Tuesday we sat in the computer lab and opened Final Cut Pro, also pre-installed on our MacBook Pros. We were given a brief run down on some basics of Final Cut and some of the fundamentals of television standards, such as PAL/SECAM and NTSC. I separate PAL and SECAM with a slash as they seem awfully similar as opposed to NTSC which is quite different. These are broadcast standards for Standard Definition (SD) TV. SD is what came before HD. It's lower resolution. SD wasn't always called SD of course, in much the same way WW1 wasn't called WW1 until WW2 came along. Also, resolution is a fairly new concept too comparatively speaking. Resolution is a term that came along with computers, but SD TV is analogue and didn't really have a set resolution. But it's normally expressed as 720x576px for PAL these days. Which is what NZ, Australia, Britain, China and Parts of Europe use. This is the resolution that DVDs are encoded as. They are encoded at that resolution whether it's widescreen (16:9 / 1.78:1 aspect ratio), ultra wide screen (2.235:1) or the old box shape (4:3 / 1.33:1). The pixels are not necessarily square.

I'm interested in learning Final Cut, perhaps for slightly different reasons than most people though who I assume want to learn such things because they either want to work in the film industry and believe it's an industry standard or because they want to edit their own films and have heard how wonderful Final Cut is. My reason is just because I want to evaluate it to determine how much of the greatness of Final Cut Pro is just Apple marketing hype. I have an acquaintance who works in television and uses Final Cut so there is no doubt that it has penetrated the professional market, taking over suites like Avid but having worked in the printing industry, I know what Adobe had to do before InDesign started to be taken up seriously over Quark Xpress. It was painfully obvious from version 2 that it was better than Quark but it probably wasn't until CS1 and even CS2 (2 versions later and some very competitive pricing) that designers started to click on en mass. Even then the pricing of site licences is what made large media companies change. It was a decision made largely by the bean counters. InDesign was a total re-write of an application called Pagemaker (which started the whole desktop publishing revolution but in it's last years was collectively known as Ragemaker). Similarly Premiere Pro was a total rewrite of Premiere but I wonder if for the first few versions, it has been unfairly regarded. So basically I want to learn it so I can have an informed opinion about it as an application.

Our homework for the night was to produce a 30-second video from stock footage made available to us for presentation the next day. This is where the folly of my all-nighters for the sake of Project 3 becomes apparent, I went home, watched the clips and fell asleep and snoozed my alarm clock right up until I had to get up to get to class on time. This kind of upset and annoyed me as I was only able to view other's work and now show my own. Not completing homework is perfectly congruous with my 4th-form self in maths class however. I will be finishing it before the end of the project though as it's part of the final hand-in. I wont be able to post it up here due to the copyright of the source footage not extending as far as posting it on the web. A slightly ridiculous win for copyright...

Wednesday, after showing our videos we learnt the next part in the creation process, which was DVD Studio Pro, part of the Final Cut suite. The Adobe equivalent is Encore, which I have used. Our homework was interesting. To chop up the 1930s classic The Wizard of Oz to make a 5-minute movie with a different story and to a genre that we all pulled from a hat. I got Western, which on one hand is good because it's a challenge due to the fact that I'm not really familiar with westerns as a genre. It's a fairly broad genre, but the first thing that comes to mind is the cheesy 50s and 60s B/W Bonanza type, followed by spaghetti westerns. Lots of Cliché's one can drop though. On the other hand due to the cheesiness that it first conjures up  it didn't excite me very much. It sort of felt like I'd been given a set of state of the art tools to make a wonderful piece of art and then asked to produce something that's kitsch. But as I've analysed westerns more I realise that there have been some truly great films and a number of modern ones too.

There were problems though. The file we had to work with was uncompressed and 22gb in size. We soon discovered that Final Cut wont open such a large file. The solution was to scrub through it in Quicktime and export out the bits we wanted. Apparently you could copy and paste but I couldn't get that working when I tried it (at home in the evening). I started to find it a bit too tedious but it wasn't until quite late that I decided to re-encode the film to H.264. At the same time I also decided to copy it across to my windows machine and try opening it on a trial copy of Premiere CS5. CS5 is compiled to 64bit while  CS4 and Final Cut Pro are both 32bit applications. Basically this means that CS5 can open a 22gb file natively unlike the 32bit applications that either have to resort to some sort of (slow) trickery or just lock up when you attempt to open a file more than 4gb in size. Networking my Mac and PC has caused me so many issues which is ridiculous in 2010. I've since discovered the secret (you have to give your user account a password on windows). But getting the file across was a bit painful and took just as long as re-encoding it. I also had frustration getting Final Cut to edit in widescreen, and the help files weren't really... Plus is became apparent that Final Cut hands over titling to Motion, part of the Final cut suite, and it was getting late. Or early rather. So over to Preimere CS5 I went. I didn't finish it, by 4am I decided I was not going to pull another allnighter, I'd had far too many recently... Which is why come morning I switched my alarm clock off in my sleep. This is getting ridiculous.

Thursday, we got the main brief, which is to group up with other people who had our genre, view everyone's submissions and re-shoot it with modifications. We have to plan the script, storyboard, locations, props, shooting order and other elements that elude me right this minute before next Tuesday, which is the day we start filming. We have 48 hours to finish shooting and we have a few small things we have to add to the final piece: A character called Elvira (the witch), red shoes and the line "There is no place like home". I know this because I read the brief online.

Friday morning, feeling better I joined my pre-designated group (to their surprise) who had already decided the story and parts people were playing and were now going to draw a storyboard. I've never worked with them before. The script lacked any real action or plot but I didn't feel like I could just wander in late and change everything especially as I currently had no ideas of my own. However we had to see a tutor to present who also said the same thing so we had to re-write it anyway. Not too impressed with the re-write either, it was done far too quickly and with not enough group input. I'm trying to determine if it's motivated by some defensive mechanism or just unwillingness to work hard at this particular project. But I want to make a good film, and I'm sort of over being frustrated by groups and my one opportunity to do something good on my own marred by my domestic situation at the time (although I didn't get a bad mark for it after all my complaining). My plan is to write a story that has a plot and elements of a Western in it this weekend. And then produce a digital storyboard, perhaps that flows on it's own and has sound. I want to do this because if it's good enough it will hopefully capture my group's imagination and also demonstrate just how much work is required to plan this, and just why it should be planned in advance (like it says in the brief anyway) rather than getting a bunch of shots and hoping to produce something from the editing process, which is a distinct feeling I got about the current approach. If I produce something decent, also then future suggestions I make (like taking photos of places we are going to shoot later so we know what we are doing beforehand - would have been handy on Friday before attempting a storyboard, but oh well) wont be met with scepticism. Once again, not sure if it was defensiveness at my attempt to lead on important issues or just because it sounded like too much work.

So I hope to inspire because I really don't want to become the ******** just to get things done properly. Never really been my style.

The only issue with the story and storyboard is I now have one day to do it if I want to present it on Monday. - And I'd really like to just relax for once.