Diploma in Digital Film

DDF 105 - Video Editing

DDF 105 Video Editing

It's in the editing stage that a film is actually 'made'. It's here that you see all your work come together, and it's often the final re-write of the script as well.

In this paper we use Final Cut Pro (or Express) to cut video. On the course DVD you'll find all the raw video clips for several scenes of my film Belief. That's all the angles and all the takes, good and bad. You'll cut together the footage and then email your project files to me. Then I'll open your project files and I'll be able to see exactly what you are doing – and give you very precise feedback.

For this system to work you will need to have Final Cut Pro or Express.

Why Final Cut Pro?

Because it's professional level software which is available at an unbeatable price if you get the academic discount. Because it's made by Apple for their own machines it's very stable, and it's fairly easy to trouble shoot. There is no comparable package on the windows platform that is as inexpensive, professional, reliable, and easy to use.

What are the assessments?

There are a number of tutorial exercises where you follow the steps I a video clip that shows the screen of Final Cut as I work with some footage (the same footage as you have on the course disc). There are four main assignments – a basic and fine cutting assignments where you produce your own cut of a scene from Belief using the raw footage supplied, a project where you create a short film using all the 'bells and whistles' of the software such as animation, text, and filters, and an essay where you will research the editing techniques used in a film.

What gear do I need.

Either Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, or Adobe Premiere CS3. Any version of Final Cut Pro or Express is OK, but you may find that you will get more out of the course if you are using a recent version of the Pro software. Earlier versions of Premiere are NOT supported - only the CS3 version of Premiere (or later) can be used on his course.

Here are a couple of sample pages from the course documents. These are just pages at random, but they’ll give you an idea of the course content.

105-1 page4.pdf

105-10 page4.pdf