Describe how you developed your post production skills for media production and evaluate how these skills informed your creative media practice. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

Over the last two years in my media coursework I have used a lot of post production methods and technologies. For AS I had to create a two minute long film opening including titles. In my second year I had to create a music promo package including a music video, advert and digipack.


The bulk of the post production work in my opinion was the editing. At AS level I tried to create a well polished sequence using my editing skills however as it was the first time i had ever had to edit professionally I had a limited knowledge of the software and editing process, however we did shoot a preliminary task video to gain a feel for the equipment and software. This limited me in terms of what I could create and the overall quality of my final product. The software I used for editing in my first year was iMovie.


 The software also limited what i could do with my sequence as it lacked many of the features i used at a higher level. iMovie had basic features which we did try to make good use of for example the cut tool and the ability to view sound-waves to match our soundtrack and effects up to the sequence correctly, however the software we opted to use at A2 was much more advanced. Another drawback of using iMovie was that it had extremely long render times, which were made worse by the low spec E-macs we did our work on which had low processing power and low RAM. This meant we had to spend a long time waiting for the sequence to render to preview the sequence, then if it turned out we did not like a particular cut we had to render the whole thing again. This was a very time consuming process.


At AS level (due to our brief) we also spent some time creating a soundtrack for our sequence using Garageband. Garageband was a useful program however had some limitations, for example due to everyone in our group using similar (or the same) software with a limited number of loops and effects it turned out that all of the soundtracks sounded very similar. Another big drawback of using Garageband was that we had to watch the video and listen to the track at the same time to ensure we edited it correctly because it would have taken too long to render our video and import it into Garageband, plus once we imported it into Garageband we could no longer edit the sequence.


At A2 level I improved upon the majority of the techniques i picked up from AS and was much more confident in using the media technologies. We had shot our AS preliminary task as well as our entire AS coursework giving us a much better understanding of what goes into sequences so that we got better shots, making post production much easier.When it came to editing I had edited many times before over the course of AS and had a wider knowledge of the whole process.


The hardware we had in the second year was also much better and allowed us to spend less time rendering. The college had recently upgraded from the old e-macs to iMacs which had more processing power and RAM. While the Macs are not ideal (and i would have preferred a windows based system) they were much better than the hardware we used in the first year.


My experiences at AS level also told me it would be wise to choose different software to work with at A2. We moved away from the basic tools of iMovie and looked at other software. Final Cut seemed to be a good option and I used it for a while towards the start of the year, then I eventually moved on to edit on a windows based system using Sony Vegas Pro. I chose to use this software because it rendered almost instantly, had a lot of extra features and effects and worked on a windows 7 based system which I know well. 


The project was saved onto a HDD hard drive so we could edit on both Macs and PCs, making the best of both software and hardware packages. I found editing a lot easier on Sony Vegas, I found the software had effects such as motion blur, bloom and over 20 others which we went on to incorporate into our video. The basic Cut & move tools were much easier to use and the program allowed us to edit on an unlimited number of tracks. Another very useful feature was that we could place markers on the sequence and music track, this came in very handy because at A2 level there was a lot of lip syncing that had to be done which should be done much more 
easily when we made good use of the markers.


The experience i gained through lessons and practical work as well as the upgraded software and hardware allowed me to be much more creative and efficient in post-production at A2 level than i was in the first year and i think i have came a long way since AS.