Question 6

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

Before I started Media A level, I had no idea how to use any aspect of the camera. For example, setting it up, Recording and then putting it away.
These were the new products that i used and started to get to grips with during the prelim and main task.

Canon XHAI Camera
Battery (and charger)
LED pull away screen
Camera tracks
Tape
Adobe Premiere pro
Tripod

Starting with the Canon camera, this camera was a very expensive camera and before media studies I had no experience with a video camera. I learnt everything that i now know (which i hope is everything about it being automatic) through step by step processing. I first learnt how to insert the battery, which was to push the button which flipped open the hatch for the battery. You would then insert the camera battery in gently which would allow the camera to be turned on. But before you would turn the camera on, you would insert the digital tape to start recording. You would then flip the rotational switch which would change the camera from off to on. Which would be manual or automatic, because we wasn’t that familiar with manual options and working with every aspect of it, we decided to stay on manual the whole time. The zoom lens and button was used a lot during our piece and I learnt that using the button makes it look more professional and flows better than the lens, also right next to the lens was a rotational switch that made the lens distorted or clearer, we didn’t decide to use this as it wouldn’t of matched the continuity.
Next up was the tripod, same as the Canon camera, we learnt how to set this up step by step. We would untie everything from it, then slowly pull each leg out. But this wasn’t good enough because it wasn’t the right size. So you would have to unlock the legs by twisting the knobs on each leg and pulling the tripod up slowly and safely, after I practised this it became easy and stuck in my head, after pulling up the tripod it was vital to lock the tripod otherwise the camera would fall off if the tripod returned to its original state without any support and at great speed. The LED pull away screen was a small screen that allowed us to see all the visual information we was recording, or what we was going to record. This would flip out by pressing a small button, we would arrange the rotation on the LED screen depending on the shot so we could see the whole shot perfectly. The tape was a digital tape which allowed 60 mins of tape on, which we nearly filled up during the whole recording. We had to record back to the beginning before we started to make sure we got the best of the tape, we did everything right and learnt how this can save a lot of time in the future.
Adobe premiere (or the editing section) was a whole new section to learn, we had to learn to cut, drag, digitize, add effects, move shots and a lot more. So it was a complete new thing to learn along as everything above that I’ve already stated. Cutting was getting the original shot and cutting it down to the ideal size; so getting rid of the ‘action’ dialogue and the ‘cut’ plus the extra length we didn’t need. But before that we had to organize our shots and pick the best shots, so we binned the shots we didn’t need. This was okay because if we changed our mind later on we could easily go back to the digitized version of the tape and just take it straight off there. Dragging the shot perfectly in place so it didn’t delete anything was also new, if we didn’t drag it securely, it would delete a part of a shot I didn’t want to get rid of.
Last thing I learnt was adding extra effects and title/closing credits. These were just as simple as clicking buttons to see if you liked the effect, and writing what you wanted.