Equipment and Software
During the process of filming, editing and creating our main video and its ancilliries we used a variety of software and equipment in order to aid our production. The software and equipment was a mix of school equipment as well as assets we had available to us at home. Click an image above to be taken to the relavent section.
Filming Equipment
During the course of filming we used a variety of equipment to achieve different effects. The most prevalent and obvious piece of equipment was the use of our camera equipment. For the majority of filming we used the Cannon 550D DSLR camera. The Cannon 550D is a 18.0MP digital single-lens reflex camera that was realesed early 2010. Despite its age it is still capable of shooting 1080p full HD video at 29.97 frames per second, making it ideal to shoot a music video in our genre as it can produce professional shots with the abillity to manually focus allowing us to create effects such as pull focuses. We used the standard 18-55mm lens which gave us a good overall view of scenes as we did not feel the need for specialist lenses such as a wide angle or fish-eye.
As well as the standard lens we also made use of a polarizing filter as we where filming in locations and at times which could affect our shots due to the sun and the glare/reflections it creates.
As well as the Cannon 550D, we breifly made use of the Cannon 650D which is the 2nd successor to the Cannon 550D. While it boasts many of the statistics of the 550D it features some suttle improvements in usability as well as quality, meaning that shots will not be that different to ones shot on the 550D allowing us to cut between the two effortlessly.
Aside from the cameras themselves, we also made use of some other accessories, such as a tripod, lighting kit, and steadycam, which allowed us to acheive more control over difficult shots.
Adobe Photoshop CS6/CC
Adobe Photoshop is regarded as the industry standard for photo editing and graphic design software available to the public. Its extensive list of features and capabillities made it a perfect option for designing our ancilleries.
The most up to date version of Adobe Photoshop available is known as Adobe Photoshop CC (Creative Cloud), while this is not available on the school system, I am lucky enough to have this version on my personal computer, which allowed me greater functionality than CS6, in areas of photo design, 3D workspaces and manipulation of images. As well as having more functionality, Photoshop CC also has backwards compatability with photoshop CS5 meaning that I could work on the same documents at home as well as school.
Adobe After Effects CS6/CC
As with Photoshop, After Effects is another acclaimed program used by professionals for creating specific effects in a clip. Unlike premiere, which focuses on overall editing and creating a timeline, After Effects is used to create digital manipulation and CGI type effects.
In our piece we plan to use After Effects for the simple job of color correction, we we found easier than in Premiere Pro, as After Effects gave us more control over our visual effects. We also decided that After Effects may come in useful if we need to create a slow motion effect, as there is a useful plugin by RE: Vision FX called Twixtor Pro, which allows extreme slow motion without the need for a much higher frame rate. As with Premiere Pro, while the school uses CS6, I am able to use CC on my home computer
Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
We decided to use Premiere Pro for the majority of our normal editing, which encompasses peicing clips together on a timeline as well as cutting, cropping and splicing clips togther.
We decided to use premiere for the bulk of our editing over after effects as it was a more ll rounded editing suite that gave us the option to playback video without rendering, which will save us a lot of time in the editing process.
The school systems use Premiere Pro CS6, which while not being the latestversion, provides more than enough capabillity for what we need to do with our proejct.
