Process: Week Three

This week we began the post-production process, after spending Week Two gathering all of the footage that we needed for the documentary. During our class periods three times a week we have access to a Mac computing lab, so we are using iMovie to edit our documentary. This program provides an easy drag and drop user interface that makes editing both more efficient and easier, while still producing professional results.

Although iMovie is a great editing program, it has a number of shortfalls, most notably the inability to change its file directory location. As a group, our only access to Mac’s, and thereby iMovie is through the iTap computer labs, which wipe any user data every time we log out. As a result, when we import our video files into the Mac, they are then deleted once we log out, which makes it impossible to continue editing the next class period without reimporting the video files.

Also, when importing footage into iMovie, the program must convert or "optimize" the cameras raw footage, which is often a compressed file, into uncompressed files that are compatible with iMovie. Although this process is entirely automated, it is painfully slow; in total it would have taken over eleven hours to import and optimize our entire 2 hours and 6 minutes of raw footage. But because over half of our footage was long, ambient room recordings, we simply chose not to optimize those clips, as we will not end up using the majority of them. This decision cut the overall import/optimize time down to just an hour and a half.