CCR Post Production

     Post-production was nice. In the end, it only really took me two days to edit both videos. Let's get right into it.

Premiere Is The Best

    Adobe Premiere is so good. I had almost forgotten, after how arduous the editing for the opening was. It took me 8+ hours just for the credits. This is because I had to keyframe each frame when I wanted to mask them, and also I had to keyframe the credits so they looked like they were part of the environment. But that is post-production for the opening, not the CCR. I really just start yapping about anything, don't I?

    I did not realize just how versatile Premiere was until I edited the CCR. I was especially surprised by how much you can do with audio. I often found myself getting lost in the audio section, and testing out what each thing did until I found what was needed. There is even a whole panel dedicated to audio, where you can edit the scenario an audio plays in. For example, you could make an audio file sound like it is coming from a phone, or like it is coming from outside a building. I never explored the audio side of Premiere before, and it is really cool to understand it a bit more now.

Day 0

    Ok, I kind of lied when I said it took two days. I mean, it took two days of actual editing, but before those days I needed to transfer all of the footage. I had SO MUCH footage. I didn't really know how to transfer files in bulk like this without a thumb drive, so I attempted to transfer them using Google Drive. I simply selected them all and pressed upload. Little did I know, uploading them would take forever. I started uploading them at 3:30pm on Thursday, and let them upload the rest of that day. Checking in on the progress at the end of the day, I saw that it was only about HALFWAY done. I could not believe my eyes and ended up telling myself it would upload overnight.

    The next morning, I immediately checked my phone to see if it was done. It was not, and the files were glitching out and infinitely retrying until they would eventually fail and move on to the next. Realizing I was losing files, I understood that I just wasted a whole day waiting for some files to upload when I could have used another method. This is when my friend told me I could just manually transfer the files using a cord. Originally I had thought you specifically needed a thumb drive to do it, but I guess you can use a charger cable instead. About half of that day was spent filming his CCR, and once I got home I tried the charger method. It worked within minutes. Now all I needed to do was open Premiere and get to editing.

Day 1

    Day one of editing was relatively simple. All I did was really just select the correct clips from my giant pile of files, and put them in order. When making the first CCR video, I realized that it was going to be way too long if we were to include all of the extra jokes we made in it. The first draft length of only the first video was about 9 minutes. That could not fly, since both videos combined had a maximum of 11 minutes and thirty seconds. I ended up cutting a BUNCH of stuff out and shortening it to about 7 minutes. It was a little heartbreaking because so many quality jokes had to be put on the chopping block.

    I then went to open another project in Premiere for the second CCR, but for some reason, it just put the same timeline again there. I was a little confused about this and deleted it. Deleting all of that felt a little wrong to me, so I checked back on the CCR 1 project and I saw that it was all gone. I had somehow deleted EVERYTHING in this project from the new second project. Thank god for control z, because that saved me from a mental breakdown. I have no clue how the timelines work in premiere, because I guess you can have the same timeline across different projects. I did not know how to make a new timeline either, so I ended up just editing the entire project in one timeline.

    Editing the second video was very similar to the first one. I just put the clips in order and shortened them to flow well. It was a similar situation to the first video as well, where I had to cut out some extra jokes to fit it all into that 11-minute and 30-second time frame. Eventually, I edited it all together to be exactly that time. I was proud of myself, and decided to call it a day.

Day 2

    Day two was all about fine-tuning and audio. I went through the entire project and noted what sound effects I needed. Once I had my list, I got to making the Foley. For my first effect, I needed to make the thumps for when we ran over the pedestrian. I did some brainstorming with my dad, and we ended up deciding that kicking a laundry hamper would sound the best. So we did just that and recorded it.

    We then recorded the Foley for when the pedestrian slides down the hood of the car. It was relatively self-explanatory, and we just rubbed our hands on our clean dining table.

    I then recorded a ringtone from my dad's phone for when the officer got the phone call.

    After these effects were done, I needed a sad song some paparazzi sound effects for the emotional montage at the end, and some police siren sound effects for when the interrogation scene is finishing up. I found a copyright-free sad song on YouTube really fast, and all I needed to do to use it was credit who it was made by. For the rest, I just used YouTube's audio library. It has a ton of free sounds for use.

    Once I edited all of these effects, I needed to go through the entire project and mix the audio to an even volume throughout. At this point, some clips were much quieter than other clips, and I simply could not have that. This process took a long time, and once I finally finished it I was wiped. This was the last step needed to finally submit this thing, and with that, finally complete the portfolio project.

Celebration

    I ended up going out to eat in celebration with my family because this project has been insanely taxing on me both physically and mentally. All I need to do now is just the final reflection blog post and then the submission. I already posted the videos on YouTube, and just need to link them to the submission blog. I am so close to having no worries about this project I can taste it.