Post production for Menopause Uncovered

Editing our documentary was both a curse and a blessing, our footage was amazing and so were all of our interviews, the audio was clear without interference and out video was sharp and in focus.

However 15 mins is the maximum amount time we were allowed to use for our final piece.

We began editing on Monday the 3rd of December, Kylan and I firstly written the voice over for our documentary than brought all of the clips into the editing timeline on my software Vegas 15. After this we shot the voice over and re recorded it until it was perfect, then on Tuesday Laura and i began the editing, we worked for the end backwards writing up all of the credits first then sectioning each section where out interviews would be. However, we quickly realised that we would not have enough time to include the vox pops we had shot, we thought as a group that the vox pops were great and informative but, they did not fit in with the style of documentary we were going with as vox pops are usually short and snappy and our documentary is calm and peaceful, below is some pictures of our documentary timeline.

3 edit

2 edit

1 edit

As seen in our pictures, i have invested a lot of time into getting our audio perfect, this is the blue dots, this means that i have either amplified of quietened down the audio track, i have put in over 100 different audio curves like this in our edit, they are used and created by me to try and iron out background sounds and to keep the interviewees voice at a constant level for consistent audio.

In our edit the only transition i have used is the basic fade as a straight cut would make the documentary feel choppy and unpolished, this was a struggle as it seemed every time i rendered the project there was always one cut where a fade should be, so i would have to re render the whole project again!

our project was in total 210GB as we used some 4K footage and some high refresh rate 1080p footage, We edited the project on my own personal computer which i built for editing and it handled the footage like a champ and was a breeze to edit on, the software i used for the project is listed below.

Editing software: Magic's Vegas 15

Colour correction: Looks FX

Transitions: Sapphire FX

The project is 14: 57 mins long down from 16:04 which was out initial edit, which was too long and each render took roughly 1 hour (if the software did not crash mid render)

Other modifications that we made from our initial edit are listed below (the notes i made), we made these changes after a one to one session with our teacher Dan, he suggested we made some changes, as well as this i gathered some feedback from my other group members on what else to change.

• 11:13 change cutaway to a more relevant shot

• 10:51 change cutaway to a more relevant shot

• Fading too soon on Lydia interview

• Lydia change hyper-lapse cost shot to normal speed

• Get personal photos of Lydia

• All ages of women on screen

• Bridget’s art comes up too soon

• Add some distorting zooms on drone shots

• Claire boxing shot at 9 min (add in)

• 10:13 – more quickly into Claire interview

• Use greenhouse presentation

• 1:08-1:15 change cutaways they are not relevant

• 2:18 more relevant cutaways

• 4:08 there is a fade that is too fast

• 4:25 there is a fade needed (cut mistake)

• 5:15 add personal photos

• Change framing on greenhouse

• Colour needs to be warmer – Bridget interview

• Cut out interviews to get the time down to 15 min 5:22 – 5:36, 10:10 – 10:34 and 4:45 – 5:05

• Up brightness Claire and Ian boxing