Editing

 Time for the part of the project I have honestly been dreading the most... editing. 

We finally have all the clips of our project filmed. I helped to film and set up both the opening shots and the news segment, but I unfortunately couldn't make it to the other parts of filming because of my dance schedule. However, I was aware before they started filming of what all the shots would consist of, and was sent pictures of costuming/angles throughout. Anyways, now that we have all the clips finally filmed, it's time to start tackling editing. 
In class, I was recommended an editing website called "VN". The girl who recommended this showed me how her editing is going, and it looked really good. Therefore, we decided to use this platform to edit. Now for the hard part, learning how to edit well. I have a little bit of experience from projects that we have done throughout the year, but I mostly stuck to simple apps like Imovie for the editing. That will not cut it for this film opening, which we want to be more professional than our past projects. So, I decided to do a little research on how to use VN. Here's what I learned:

Tutorial

• Similar to how adobe premier is, you have to "lock" your video in place when converting it to different formats. This is equivalent to adding a key to your videos in adobe. Luckily, I am already familiar with this. 
• You zoom in on the timeline to trim certain clips. Get rid of bloopers, retakes, etc. Leave it with only the clip you need.
• You can make cuts in between clips, and it will automatically close the gap for you.
• You can layer footage on top of other things, which would show the new clip but still have an audio from the original clip. Useful for flashbacks, adding context to the film, etc.
• Adding titles and text is easy and customizable. Useful for the end credits, opening title, etc. You can even add motion to the text. 
• You can use speed control to slightly speed up/slow down clips, depending on the effect you're trying to create.
• VN includes many copywrite free sounds, which is extremely helpful for our opening, because we won't have to import from separate websites.

This video made me a lot less stressed about the editing process of this opening. VN is a very beginner friendly tool. A lot of the effects and editing tools are simple and do not require you to know specific terms or keys, like Adobe does. For example, if you want to add a certain transition, there is literally a whole folder that says "transitions" and offers different options. This is just an amazing tool that I am so glad I came across. If we want to do anything more complicated, our group member Zain is going to show us how to do it on Adobe, since it does have a bit more advanced features. I have also decided to use this tool for my CCR's.