Editing the Commercial (2)

     We overcame the previous technical difficulties and were able to fully edit today. I had to re-dump my raw footage onto the new laptop and import it into Pinnacle studios. During the first import, though, the program crashed. The second import was successful. I began to look through my footage and select which takes were the best. This process was made difficult because of how slow Pinnacle Studios was. The clips lagged and often cut off before the whole clip could play. However, eventually I got used to the lag and adapted to it. I found the takes I thought were the best and dragged them onto the timeline. I ensured there were no gaps in between the clips by right clicking a blank area of the timeline and selecting "Close All Gaps".

     My clips all had extra footage at the beginning and end that needed to be cut off and deleted. At first, I didn't know how to do this. However, I found a "Split" option above the timeline. I placed the triangle slider where I wanted to cut and clicked the split button. I deleted the extra parts I didn't need. I did this for each clip. For the part of my commercial where I show a close-up of the coffee cup, I needed transitions. I right clicked on one of the clips and found the "Transitions" option. However, upon seeing that the default transition was a cross dissolve, I found the transition library next to the sound effect library. From there, I selected the fade transition and dragged it onto the clips that needed it.

    The visual aspects of my commercial were complete after a few final adjustments. I needed to work on the audio next. While selecting clips and placing them into the timeline earlier on, I detached the audio of each of them. I selected the clips and clicked the "Detach Audio" option that was next to the split option. The audio entered a different track and I deleted it. I had recorded a narration seperately with my phone, due to my lack of a microphone. I imported the audio and chose the best takes of each line. I matched up the narration to the corresponding clips. I noticed that the audio sounded slightly muffled, but I couldn't figure out how to make it clearer without completely redoing the recordings. The voice over was finished and added. 

     After noticing some jarring silence throughout the commercial, I decided to add some ambient noise. I found a royalty free urban ambiance track from Youtube, downloaded it, and imported it. The audio was loud, so I turned the volume down using the audio mixer located on the left of the audio track. With the ambiance added, the commercial was finally complete.