So I’m feeling rather productive at the moment since in just a few days I’ll be on the beach enjoying Spring Break. Anyways, I feel the need to blog about the recent technology struggles I had completing my TV- News Style piece.

Ok, so the journalist nerd I am… I am shooting footage at Suite Leaf – the very last fit camp of the six week challenge. I get done shooting an interview with one of the female participants – have my headphones in – everything sounds great. Well, I played back my audio when we were done and OH MY GOODNESS – Did I interview a man with an unusually deep, strung out voice?!

So FiLmic Pro kind of screwed me over. Basically everything I shot from the actual fit camp was shot because I couldn’t use any of the sound. That’s okay though, I made it work. I tried troubleshooting everything. I ended up frantically emailing my professor, but by the time he got back to me it was too late. I ended up having to shoot the video with the built in camera/video app on the iPad. Unfortunately, with this app I couldn’t use the stick mic, so I went with the native mic, and annoying me had to hush everyone in the room. That was fun. The poor girl I interviewed.. I had to ask her the same questions three different times. The first time she sounded strange, the second time there was too much background noise, and finally the third time was a charm.

Ok, so after going through all the trouble. I decided to come back the next day to gather the rest of my footage and a couple more interviews. Professor Judd got back to me, I tested the mic out that night and reselected 24 fps as he suggested and all was good.  WRONG. I went back the next morning and tried using FiLmic and yet again the sound was shot. I am so thankful to have such cooperative and understanding subjects. These ladies have been nothing but wonderful to work with.

Another issue I had was with the lenses. I got some awesome footage, but I guess I didn’t have the lens on quite right and you can notice it in some of my clips, but of course I didn’t notice it until I got back and started editing. So that was frustrating. I also noticed that my interview shots could have been a lot tighter. It is really hard to get it all right when your doing both the interview and working the camera. It’s a lot to think about when your on the spot and are using up someone else’s time. I also feel like it looked a lot tighter on my iPad than when I watched it back on YouTube from my computer.

At least the editing in Pinnacle ran smoothly! It only crashed once and all was saved. Scripting a broadcast style script before beginning the editing process also helped a lot in that process.

Oh well, its done now and that is forever behind me. I am really hoping we can use a different app to film in for our final projects, which by the way I am super excited for!