In-Class Video/Audio Editing Assignment

It was a fun assignment composing a video and audio file (finished clips below) with the samples that you provided us in class – mainly because I don’t typically work with these media. I liked using the two media, video and audio, to create one project because it allowed me to create a certain feeling, or mood, to the final video. Below is a brief description of the approach that I used for this assignment.

I began the editing process by watching and listening all of the clips. Then, I imported the video clips into Windows Movie Maker in chronological order, and I also imported a song that I thought complimented it. After trimming this song to match the length of the video, I watched what I had so far, and it looked a bit rough. To make the scenes flow together more smoothly, I added a few transitions. This was a little challenging because I didn’t want to add too many different transitions, but I didn’t want to just use the traditional fade either. After finding a healthy balance, I added some opening and closing titles and watched the video again. Overall, I liked what I had, but I thought that it needed a little something extra. That’s when I started to experiment with different video effects, and I was very happy with “Film Age, Old” because I felt that it added to the nostalgic feeling of the video.

There were a few challenges that I ran into with the editing of this video, aside from the transitions. Although I liked the music that I layered behind the video, there were some scenes where the music wasn’t synching well. I overcame this to a degree by speeding up certain scenes, but overall the synching still isn’t great. Another constraint was that I wanted to split the sound from the video files that you gave us so that I could delete some of the background noise, but I wasn’t sure how to do that.

I also created an audio file by using Audacity, and I thought that this was more difficult than the video editing process. As with the video, I listened to all of the narrated clips, and I organized them into what I thought was the chronological order. Then, I imported them into Audacity, and listened to what I had so far. At this point, I realized that I needed to edit some of the silence out and some of the narration so that it transitioned better. I repeated the process of listening to the entire file and editing parts out until I was relatively happy with what I had.

Although I’m not used to working with these programs or media, the editing process wasn’t all that different than writing/editing a paper. For example, before I start a paper, I read the materials that my paper’s about, and then I organize my thoughts into chronological order. Once I have a draft, I read it over and edit it. Then I read it again, revise it further, and reread it until I’m happy with it.

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