AV

The Olympus Digital camera I used for my second drift worked surprisingly well for a bargain camera. The response time on the camera was good and it took decent photos and videos. The memory card with the camera had plenty of room for all my files. The functions on the camera were easy to use and accessible. However, the camera was pretty cheap and lacked in a few areas. It had rather limited options and a very small menu. Also, the screen was relatively tiny, but served my purposes. My two biggest complaints while shooting video: the zoom function disabled during recording video and during fifteen minutes of recording video it went through fourteen batteries. Though the camera was suitable for all of my filming, it wasn’t comparable with cameras (even still image) I have worked with in the past. The cameras I’m used to working with are built better and have a lot more functionality. If I could have chosen the perfect camera to work with, I would have kept the compact design that was important for its functionality in the field. I would have liked to see a long life rechargeable battery. It would also be nice to have a wide range of options to tweak on the camera, especially for manual adjustments. I could have benefitted from a manual zoom and focus and aperture settings. These functions would have offered me a great deal of creative license not to mention higher quality images. I would also like to continue working with digital video. Though film is a high quality medium not to be overlooked by any means, for my purposes on the drift a hard drive camera shooting higher resolution digital video would have more than sufficed.

Once back in the studio with my images and video, I chose to use my favorite editing software, Adobe Elements. I began using Adobe a little over a year ago when I was in high school and began to get serious about working with film. I took an independent study class for film and it was the software my instructor provided. I found the program rather intuitive and taught myself to use it pretty easily (with a little technical help from my instructor now and again). Since then I’ve made quite a few short films on the program and out of necessity for the projects I began to undertake as part of my class purchased a copy of my own. I made a thirty minute video for the schools registration program and also a roughly thirty minute independent short film with a few friends of mine. While undertaking these extensive projects, I began to learn more and more about the programs functions and have created clever tricks and alternatives for editing my way through certain problems and challenges. It came to the point where I could anticipate certain problems and use and build on my previous work to solve them easily. Although I’ve tried other programs like Sony Vegas Pro and appreciated the features, I didn’t like the format. I enjoy the working with footage in Adobe. The key-frame and drag and drop manipulation of effects and footage suits my “style” of editing. I am highly considering upgrading to Adobe Pro because I’m quickly exhausting the resources in elements. I have toyed with most all of the effects and need more. Until then, Elements will be my “go to guy”.