Reflection - March 5, 2010

Today was filled with many challenges and difficulties but I also learned a lot about capturing film onto a computer and how the media lab works at CIS. Unfortunately, Harry and Zoe, two of my group members were absent for this lesson generally making the lesson more difficult and confusing.

Jade and I had planned for this double lesson to capture all of the film off of the tape and then begin to edit even. However due to my previous absences, I had missed the lesson where students were taught how to use Final Cut Pro and log and capture the film. Jade said she had missed that lesson too, so the lesson did not start off too well. I then went to my friend, Sophia, for some help as she seemed to know what she was doing somewhat. We connected the firewire to the camera, had everything set up, opened Final Cut Pro. And then we realized we had not found the footage of the three interviews we had completed that week. Neither knowing how to use the camera, nor being the one who had supposedly rewinded the tape before we started to film, I really did not know what I was doing. Jade and I spent 45 minutes, simply trying to find the footage on the tape. Eventually we found it after rewinding and fast forwarding through the tape at least three times.

We then began to capture, by trying to press the capture now button, but Final Cut Pro then froze, and the spinning dial appeared on the screen. Being patient, we waited for a few moments to see if the software was only lagging, but soon decided it was not going to recover. We then proceeded to force quit the application only to find that wasn't working either, so we had to restart the computer. This problem continued to happen several times and after restarting the computer for the third time we decided to step up and ask for some more help. Mr. Chiang then helped us to clear up some space on the scratch drive and made sure all of the settings were correct on Final Cut Pro for it to work.

Once everything was all cleared up, we clicked capture again but the computer simply froze again and we had to go to class and I decided I would have to come back at lunch to clear things up and start capturing in preparation for the next lesson when we could start filming.

When I came back at lunch, everything worked much better, I set it up on a new computer and left it all capturing successfully. I came back after school to check on it and tidy away the equipment, but found the computer had frozen again, but luckily most of the footage was already captured.

Overall, today was very difficult, with many problems and challenges which were time-consuming to overcome, but it is important that I learn how to use Final Cut Pro and how to capture film and so on and the best way to learn is through making mistakes. Next time, I will make sure I set up all of the settings correctly to prevent any problems and make sure I give the computer lots of time to process the information. I will also be more careful when filming to rewind the tape to the beginning.