Progress and a Hiccup (Weekly Reflection Feb 13- Feb 20)
This week I was able to make ample progress with my work. I acquired a drone and took aerial shots of the shooting location for my project. The footage was shot in 4K and was a terrific way to open up the title sequence of my piece. The plan is to edit the footage in Adobe After effects and add a “point of interest” pop-out text graphic commonly seen in military movies where the location, date and time are displayed as if one was looking through a military HUD. I also filmed over 100 additional shots that I will use to start piecing together the video portion of my project. I then took each new shot, isolated out the audio and ran noise correction via sound reduction, trimming, EQ and normalization techniques. I now have built an even larger noise clip library which contains hundreds of sounds. After the filming was done, I was able to go into Adobe premiere and assemble a decent first take at the second title sequence. I am having issues with my computer not being able to handle Premiere (lagging for 5 minutes sometimes to play one clip with a simple crossfade), and I recognize that as my project gets larger this will not be able to continue. This is despite much research and troubleshooting as well (I have a quad-core processer, 16gb of RAM and a TB SSD which runs my entire OS). I will look into using the Mac’s provided at TCNJ to do the “heavy lifting” in Premiere Pro for the remainder of my project.
I found this Medium post which was relevant to my situation in Premiere. Apparently a slow Adobe Premiere is a common issue among video editors. This article provided some tips on how to optimize Premiere’s settings for better performance. Some tips which I felt helped a little bit were allocating more RAM to the software when in use, reducing playback to 1/4 resolution, toggling effects on and off during playback, and cleaning and clearing unused cache files. However, it is still not running efficiently enough for me to be able to feel confident working and being creative instead of waiting for processes and commands to load or dropping frames. However, these tips have rendered Premiere at least, “usable” on my computer, and this is a big step in the right direction.
The big takeaway for me this week was that sometimes one can end up spending more effort on certain mundane portions of their projects that they never expected would take as much time away from their creativity. When I began this process, I assumed that the majority of my time would be spent composing and editing audio. Instead, it is the video editing which is taking up the majority of my time. This can sometimes be frustrating, because I am spending more effort on the components of my work I am the least interested in.
