New technologies

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

By Aidan Rawlinson

BloggerFrom the very beginning of our Media Project, we had to use Blogger to record our progress. While I had used Blogger before then, it was only very briefly. The project required us to publish posts very frequently on different topics. At first, it was slightly difficult to use, with glitches often occurring, but eventually I got the hang of it and was able to write posts and embed videos and presentations.

SlideshareAnother new website which I had to learn to use was Slideshare, a site where you can make/upload slide show presentations and share them. This was actually relatively easy as I did not necessarily have to create the presentations through Slideshare but instead could just upload presentations I had already made through either PowerPoint or google Slides.

VimeoAs a means of uploading and sharing the work we had done, Vimeo was the easiet way of doing this for the simple reason that it was not blocked by the school internet system as was Youtube. I had never used Vimeo before but I found very simple and easy to use. The only problem I found with it is that it takes a very long time to upload a video and there is a limit on how large the file size of an upload can be.

PreziAnother website used to make presentations, Prezi is slightly different as you don’t create a basic slide show. Instead, you have various writing and pictures all laid out and, when the presentation is started, it will move to each of them in an order of your choosing. I found prezi to be more complicated than it needed to be and much prefer making a simple slide show that gets the point across quicker.

Nikon D3200The camera with filmed our OTS with was a Nikon D3200 Digital DSLR which I received as a gift for Christmas. This proved to be a big step up from what I was used to as I had previously shot with either a flip camera or a digital camcorder. Luckily, though, Billy was much more used to these types of cameras and was able to help me with it on the day of filming.

Rode Videomic RycoteAlong with the camera, a piece of technology that was new to me was the Rode Videomic. In past, I had just used the camera’s in-built microphone for recording audio. However, this wasn’t very effective, especially with long shots. But with the Videomic, however, I could now record sound much more clearly from a distance. Even though, we didn’t need to record audio as we add in sound effects and music in post, we thought it be best to record the raw sounds just in case we liked how they sounded.

Final Cut ProDue to the fact that the only computers in our Media class were Apple Macs, the editing of our OTS was done through Final Cut Pro. The main editing software that I am used to using is Sony Movie Studio, so Final Cut Pro took a bit of getting used to. While I was annoyed by the numerous differences, I do have to admit that there are some aspects that are better than Movie Studio (namely the effects and the way the clips in the timeline can be controlled easily).