Yes, the title is slightly over the top. As perusal, the final editing process has been squeezed into the final days, along with my millions of other assignments. It’s okay though. Unlike last time, with our first attempted pilot, I actually have some decent footage (and audio!) to work with. For editing, I am working alongside Skylar.

Prior to getting started on post-production, I took some steps, that I thought would be important, just to ensure that when it came to actually getting stuck into editing, nothing too major went wrong.

Firstly, it was important to go over the footage and make sure that there were no major flaws with the footage, or with the sound especially. I went through all of the clips that I would be needing, and lucky for me there was nothing major, that I wouldn’t be able to work around, whilst I was editing the episode. There were small things, such as audio being louder in parts, and maybe the video unfocused for a moment, but other than that, we were pretty clear of any major disasters.

I organised to use the editing suites, as editing from a laptop can be super tedious at times, especially when it comes to syncing up the footage to the audio pieces.

I was all set, with my editing suite booked, but then disaster struck!! After trying to upload my premiere project to the suites computers, I soon realised the worst… The suites had an older version of Premiere set up. Update it? Oh no. Being a student, I didn’t have access to make changes to the computer.

This lead to me spending the next hour, attempting to convert my files so that they could be opened in an older version of adobe. I tried exporting it as an XML file, but that didn’t work. I tried “un-updating” my Premiere app, which also didn’t work. I really was in a bit of a pickle.

I wish this blog post could have had some sort of sound conclusion, but unfortunately it isn’t going to. In the end, I just had to use the editing suites to keep the shot list and script up on screen, but for now, that was all I could really use it for. I stuck to editing on my laptop, or else I would have probably just wasted another hour trying to do something that wasn’t actually possible.

As they say, where there is will, there is a way. I knuckled down and did the editing on my laptop, which really wasn’t too bad, more just frustrating that there was a huge desktop computer sitting in front of me, that I had really no way of using.

Aside from this little obstacle, post-production went smoothly. There was the typical problems, such as not being able to easily locate clips, getting angry trying to sync audio and footage together, but I didn’t really expect any less.

I worked shot by shot, and with some time to spare, I had a pretty decent rough draft put together. Doing the fine tuning was a bit difficult on my laptop, as cutting just milliseconds off a shot is hard to do using an overly sensitive laptop mouse.

I think I edited together a pretty solid episode, but like everyone says every time, if I had given myself more time, I think it could have been even better. Some links between character lines could have been strengthened, and the pacing is slightly off in parts of the first scene. Nothing flows terribly, but I definitely know that there is huge room for improvement, as there always is.