Using Final Cut Pro

To create my media trailer, I have been using a piece of software on the schools apple Macs called 'Final Cut Pro'. There is other move making software out there like Sony Vegas and Windows Movie Maker but I believe the best is Final Cut Pro, and I also have free access to it. Last year in A1 we weren't making motion picture texts just still magazines so this year was a big step up for I'd never done anything like this before. I did used to have a youtube channel which I regularly posted on a few years ago but not to the level we are at in A2. At first I found it quite hard to pick up, like photoshop its all about trial and error for the first few attempts, until you get used to it. The thing that makes it so good is that you can manipulate everything, images, the footage and the one big thing I thought was great, the sound. One of the pieces of audio we have is an old music box, so I put two audio effects over it called 'Telephone' and 'Short Delay' which makes it sound even more creepier than it already was. One of the tools that really helped me out at times was the stabilise tool, often without the tripod we couldn't get a steady shot depending on the angle. And what was good footage was ruined by shaky camera work, until i found out how to stabilise. This is a feature that stops the shaking, but at times it can blur the footage and make it look worse so I tend not to rely on it too much.

But I learnt many skills last year that were transferable to this year like how to manipulate photo's to get a different vibe from it. For example look at the pictures above.

The top one has no filter, and the bottom one has the 'cool tone' filter. This is what I mean, the first shot didn't look that creepy, whereas when I put the filter over it' looked much better. This also allows me to film at different times of day, sometimes. I could be in a sunny room at 11 o'clock in the morning but i could turn it into midnight on FCP. I kind of did the same with my poster, the main image for that I edited in Pixlr which I used to alter my photo's last year.