Evaluation Question 4

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Blogger

Research and planning: Blogger has proven very useful to me throughout the process. It was especially helpful during the research and planning phase of the project. Blogger gave me a great way to record all of my research I had conducted and post it online. Posting my research was very useful because it allowed my teachers to look at my research and then comment on it, telling me what to do to improve it, or how to then use this research and apply it to my products. Posting my research also allowed me to give labels to each post. This allowed me to group posts about similar topics. For example, I could group all of my work related to ancillaries under the tag 'Ancillaries' making it easier for myself and other people to find specific parts of my work.

One problem I encountered with blogger was something that took away quite a bit of my time. When attempting to place an image into a blog post, my school's internet safety programme was blocking me from inserting any pictures. This slowed my progress because I couldn't upload any finished posts. This problem did not occur for every student as well which confused me quite a bit.

Production: During production, blogger allowed me to post progress updates. This allowed my teachers and also myself to keep track of what I was doing and what I planned to do. This then gave my teachers the opportunity to tell me if I was keeping on track or not. Blogger also allowed me to post drafts of my products. For example, when I uploaded a draft of my video to YouTube, Blogger made it very easy for me to embed a copy of the video to a post.

Evaluation: Blogger has helped me throughout the evaluation by allowing me to post my responses to the questions, whether they are blog posts like this one, or links to presentation software like Prezi. Blogger is very easy to post links or embed projects from other websites. However, sometimes embedded presentations do not work very well and have some issues when trying to access them, which makes my work difficult for teachers to comment on sometimes.

Final Cut Pro

Production: Final Cut Pro is a video editing software available for iMacs. This is the software that I used to edit my video. Final cut pro was a very useful technology towards this project. It allowed me to easily drag and drop clips into the sequence and easily match them up to certain time frames. Final Cut Pro allowed me to easily trim clips to the right length easily which made the timing of the piece pretty easy to match up with the clips. Final Cut Pro provides four separate windows on display at once, one for the list of clips, one for the selected clip, one for the assembled current sequence, and the final window for the clips to be dragged into place with a time frame. This made it very easy to navigate the software without having to continually switch between windows and getting confused.

Final Cut Pro has it downsides however, the main one being that it is very difficult to log and capture your clips from the camera to the software. There was an endless amount of connection types to choose from, with little guidance on which to choose for the current connection, which is not very helpful for people with limited skills with this kind of technology. Whether this problem occurred due to the software or by fault of the camera, Final Cut Pro still did not offer any help or advice on how to troubleshoot the problem. On top of this, Final Cut Pro does not offer any tutorials directly within the software meaning all problems had to be solved using external information, which did not allow me to progress efficiently.

Sony HDB 1100 Camera

Production: The camera I used to film my video with was very easy to use. It was simple to turn on, and was easy to use straight from start up, especially for a beginner in camera operation like myself. It gave a clear visual of when the recording process had started and stopped, how long the clip had been recording for, and a two options for viewfinders which allowed me to easily see what I was pointing the camera at, and how well things fitted into shot. The camera also gave options to adjust effects like zoom, focus range and exposure which allowed me to adjust the depth and the lighting of shots. These features were easy to adjust using scroll wheels and touch pads. The camera held a very long battery life as well which allowed me to film without interruption, speeding up the process.
One disadvantage of the cameras is that they are very large and heavy. This made holding the camera a little awkward sometimes because after holding the camera in a still position for an extended period, your hands start to shake a little and that throws off the steadiness of the shot. The weight also meant that the camera would not stand up when I attached it to a tripod. This is because it was heavier at the back, and would fall backwards if it was unmanned. Another downside which has been previously mentioned is the lack of support on how to log and capture the clips. This is probably more down to the software and not the camera, however from what I experienced, the camera did not come with any information about connection settings or setup.

Serif PagePlus X9

Production: Serif PagePlus X9 was used to make my digipak design. I had already used this software for my A/S coursework, so I was quite familiar with how the software works. PagePlus allows you to very easily draw shapes and resize/re position them. Text manipulation is also very easy, and there is a very wide range of fonts to use. Effects like outlines and 3D text are available to apply to text and shapes, giving you a massive amount of options when editing your text. Importing images onto PagePlus is very simple, and the software even has its own built in photo editing software, which allows you to cut and trim photos, change their appearance and many more features.
One downside to this software is that even though there is a wide range of font styles to choose from, a lot of them are not very good or very easy to use within a media project. The names of the fonts do not allow you to easily find out what style they represent and the names of the fonts are quite confusing.