bLOG #3: failed Cut Pro
As much as I love Final Cut Pro, I also hate it at times. It’s more temperamental than my teenage sister; one minute it’s smooth sailing, the next your locked out with no way in. That is what happened this week.
Zoha approached me early last week to ask if I would be interested in partaking in the first episode of her new video series ‘Out and About in Limerick’ where she meets with numerous different people from or based in Limerick doing a variety of different things. For the first episode, she was featuring, Leah Rowe, a Creative Design student who set up an Instagram page selling commissions for illustrations. Zoha that it would be something I would be interested in and so asked me to get involved. I was delighted to be a part of it!
We planned some questions together and set up a time to meet Leah at her student house in Limerick. We recorded a mixture of b-roll and the interview on both our phones using tripods and then set up a time for the next day to meet up and edit everything. We were both quite excited about editing this project as given the subject matter of illustration we knew we could be quite fluid and experimental in our editing. We knew quite early on that we would like to incorporate aspects of Procreate (the design software I use on my iPad) into the project as it really fit the subject matter. We decided to include the questions on a coloured background between each answer which I think worked really and broke the piece up nicely!
I must admit, in hindsight I don’t think we got as much b-roll as we should have. I would have liked to have more variety in the finished package and less jerkiness between shots but alas, you live and you learn.
Everything about the package went pretty great except for the editing. It started off okay but after the inserted file number began to increase, the software speed began to decrease. Everything slowed down until eventually it froze. I must admit both our hearts stopped as we watched the tiny colour wheel go round and round and round and round for minutes on end. For a minute I thought we would lose everything but thankfully Final Cut Pro saved it. After spending about an hour of going back and forth opening and closing Final Cut Pro, we accepted that any attempt to use it was just going to end in it freezing so we decided to use the 10-second window of unfrozeness to export the video and finish editing it later.
Thankfully this worked and I was able to finish editing it today.
