Problems and Obstacles

I've completed the first of two videos. Whoever said never work with animals was correct. I decided to make the commitment to adding more media to the classroom, so I invested in a new camera. This will be important later. I charged the batteries, studied the shots I needed, and got ready to make my dogs movie stars. The problem was that this was Sunday afternoon, and it was hot. Peaches decided to be a diva and stood at the back door demanding to go back into the air condition. Rooney was more of a trooper. She embraced the opportunity to be an actress. Unfortunately, she was somewhat of an exhibitionist. She did the typical things that dogs do which shouldn't make it to video. Both of the dogs were restless, and it was difficult to get them to stand still long enough to get a shot. Mostly, I put food down to keep them in one place. I had the most difficulty with the noddy shot. I wanted to have one of my dogs sit then lay down. They know how to do this so it shouldn't have been a stretch. However, upon sitting they wanted to crawl toward me and that ruined the shot. I finally got Peaches to sit but that's all the shot is. I am concerned that my clips will not be long enough.

After gathering my shots, I went inside to start editing my video. Here I ran into an obstacle. My new camera recorded in Quick Time which was not compatible with Windows Movie Maker. I spent the next 30-40 minutes looking for a free converter. I thought I found one, but thankfully I read the reviews which exposed as a virus, spy ware, and spam filled depending on which review I read. I finally found Prism which would freely convert my files. My computer spent the next hour and a half converting the files. By that time I wasn't interested in editing a film. So I waited to work on it Monday afternoon.

The process of editing the film was straight forward, but time consuming. After finishing the video, I started putting the audio into the video. I had to spend some time looking at Atomic Learning and reading the Help feature to do this part. I had to play with the settings to get the narration right. I found the music to loop through the narration. It took time to get everything correct.

The thing I have learned the most from these production assignments is that they will always take considerably more time than I expect.