Finished!

Today I finished my Final Major Project!

I took the footage I shot yesterday and edited it, colour graded it and added it to the final composition. Once all of the footage was in place, I made sure that it synced up with the music. When I'd done this I found there was a 12 second gap near the beginning of the video, at the end of the clip that I decided to change during filming. I tried slowing the clip down to half speed to fill the gap, but the footage looked really jerky and not good at half speed. I therefore went back to the After Effects comp and changed the editing of the footage around so that it was 29 seconds long instead of 17 seconds long. I did this by adding more split screens to make the time it took to get through them al longer.

Once I'd filled the gap I had to render the video out so that I could watch it from beginning to end without it lagging or stopping. When I watched it through there were a few things that needed changing, so I went back and changed them and then rendered the final piece out again.

When I looked at the file size of the video when using an H.264 codec it was on the very large side at 5.95GB. I spoke with a tutor who recommended I try adjusting the quality of the render and finding a compromise on quality and size. I started with 50% quality and that rendered out at under 2GB, and the quality wasn't too different. I eventually settled on 80% quality, which wasn't much different to 100% quality, but was only 2.4GB.

When I spoke to my tutor he also showed me a document about formatting for hand in. We needed to hand in 2 versions at 2 different codecs and sizes, and we also needed to include the university logo at the end of our work, showing that they have permission to use our work in the future.

I am really pleased that have finally finished my video and am looking forward to turning my attention to my other modules now and getting everything finished off....after writing the final 8000 word report of course!