Everybody cut, everybody cut...

Busy week. Saw 7 hours of the production performances (all of Tuesday, first half Wednesday, filmed Friday, helped out/watched Saturday). It was very good, and got noticeably better as the kids performed more, the crowds got bigger and the technical aspects became smoother. I am now slaving away over the DVD, having bought a 200gb external hard drive specifically for school production editing. I believe my school's production is even going to reimburse me for it, which is an awesome thank-you for doing the filming/editing. It's going to be a heck of a lot easier this year, using Premier Pro instead of Windows Moviemaker. Last year was silly amounts of work. This year it's pretty much a case of syncing up the footage from 2 cameras, deleting the sound on one track, then trimming away all of the bits of the close up footage that we don't want to reveal the wider angle footage that's sitting under it. Then repeat, in very quick fashion, for the third camera, which is a very wide angle (all the way from the back of the hall). We probably won't end up using much of the very wide, but there are a few places where it'll come in handy. The benefit is that it's much, much faster than last year. The only bummer is the 8 or so hours I have to spend capturing all the footage. The transfer rate for the USB hard drive is good, but over a 50 minute capture (around 10gb) it tends to drop a few frames of footage, which puts things out of sync. So I have to capture to an internal drive, then copy the files across. Which is fine, but adds even more time to a time consuming process. Right, I have reached my self-imposed 7 minute time limit for blogging - better post this and get some work done!