"Join This Group?" Post-production

It's over. We finished it. Editing went down in about ten hours over two days, and the result - a fine looking short.

We did the rough cut early in the week. It took about four hours to capture and log the footage and assemble the cut. The focus is a little out in some spots, but the audio sounded better than I thought it would. And we noticed we inadvertently had a lot of product placement - specifically for Apple Macs and Coca Cola. Our editor is pretty well versed in Final Cut Pro, so she knew all the little tricks to cover for mistakes.

The fine cut happened last night, over about six hours. We had to use different facilities, which meant sharing a room with fourteen other computers and a large group that took over half that space. Tried editing sharing a pair of earbuds recently? It's difficult. That's another reason why it's especially important, when you can't judge on your own perceptions alone, to watch the volume levels when editing. We also had to add in the voice over narration, which meant using the sound room. Unfortunately, it didn't want to work initially. We played with all the preferences, checked the connections, and even asked the student technician for help. When nothing worked and we were about to give up in desperation, we decided to restart the computer entirely.

Apparently that is key, people.

It's great to work on a project that you enjoy while you edit. We were giggling at jokes we'd heard over and over and over again. Maybe that had something to do with the hour of the night. We burned to CD at around 1:00 AM, and almost immediately I was able to screen it to a couple of friends.

You, too, will be able to screen it soon. Just watch for our main website to be up and running!