Sequencing Blog

When sequencing my footage using final cut express, first I organised the footage I wanted to use, I did this by double-clicking a clip in the Browser window, so it appeared in the Viewer. To look through a clip, I dragged the playhead, and used the arrow keys to move frame by frame. I then used the Mark In/Mark Out buttons to add in/out points in the clips when I had decided on which part I wanted to use. Once inserted, I just dragged to adjust them in the Viewer. By clicking the 'Motion' tab in the window, I adjusted properties such as size, centre point, opacity, etc to create the right effect. When the clip was ready, I dragged it from the Viewer to the Timeline as an insert. As I had never used final cut express before I spent some time experimenting with different effects and transitions such as fade to black and other wipes, however I found most of these appeared tacky and amateur looking so I mainly used fade to black and dissolve. One of the problems I encountered when editing my captured footage was that Final Cut Express couldn’t find my scratch disk so I had to use the setting to manually locate it. Another problem was selecting the exact footage I wanted to use by dragging the playhead so I had to use different arrow keys, however as there are so many and I didn’t know the function of all of them, this took some time. Also, as I didn’t have enough extra seconds of recording before and after each clip, the continuity was lost which created jump cuts, if I could do this advert again I would make sure I vary my shots from a range of different angles and distances and ensure to film colour bars and extra seconds before and after each shot. When I added different effects and transitions, it took a long time to render the files and also I didn’t understand the error messages.