Last night, I drove to Sarah’s place with Liam to finish up honey pot. We had one last thing to do: synchronize images and music. In the car, Liam gave me some tips for the following project: use a thing called ‘timecode’ earlier in the process, and have someone fully responsible for all the sound editing. I guess I hadn’t thought much about the technicalities of sound mastering, being a novice in the field, and shooting a silent movie; but I will definitely need someone to work on that for the next project.
Fortunately, synchronizing was quick – in about fifteen minutes, images and music were aligned. But I hadn’t anticipated exporting. The final cut files need converting to another format – options are infinite, with room for error in the choice of resolution, frequency, colour, and other parameters no-one seems to really understand. We tried, and failed, a couple of times – each tentative taking five to fifteen minutes of loading. And once we had four files in a format that could work, Sarah couldn’t copy them onto my PC-formatted hard-drive (they were too big, Nghi later discovered), so we spent more time re-formatting it for Mac. Only to find out, a couple of days later, on Nghi’s computer, that we still didn’t have the right format.
Digital work is wonderful, for the freedom it allows – so much footage, at no added cost, and immense editing capacity on a desktop. But how frustrating are these technical details, and the sheer time of conversion and copying! At least, we didn’t have a pressing timeline to add stress; and now, the product is finished.
