Video Lab 2

My UWS Hamilton campus tour is live at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwjQRXaOyXU&feature=youtu.be

To begin with I had a whopping 48 minutes of video to cut down, after half an hour I managed to cut it down to under 10 minutes of footage, I then set the speed of the video to 2x so I would be just under the 5 minute limit. I recorded the whole thing in portrait which was a mistake because 2/3rds of the screen were just black borders.

• I re-recorded it properly a few days later and this time i had a more manageable 10 minutes of footage to work with.
• To deal with a video that's lasting longer than intended I feel like making too many scene cuts hurts the fluidity of a video so setting the speed faster helps in that regard, especially if the only thing hurting your time is walking speed. This also means that I could show more areas.
• I added various animations between scenes to make the cuts seem less abrupt.
• I recorded myself narrating using the windows movie maker function
  
• The narration included some facts about the campus I got from wikipedia so I could avoid moments of silence.
• I added a a royalty free music track which is calm and non intrusive for the video so it didn't drown out my commentary, after adjusting the volume levels of the soundtrack and the narration it worked a like charm.
• At the end of the last scene I including a sepia tone visual effect and a fade out, also the background music fades out at this time to signal the end of the video.
• I displayed the UWS logo for the last 5 seconds of the video.

Here is a picture of how the video looked in movie maker after saving:

If I were to do this lab again I would record it landscape the first time and record less wasted footage the first time, however, because I retried the lab a second time I feel like I learned a lot from the mistakes I made the first time and didn't do them again.

Video Lab 1

My video edit of the gallery tour is located at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmP4lr79JBU&feature=youtu.be

Answer the following

• Please write a few paragraphs explaining why you made the edit cuts in the footage that you did?
• What emotional effect did you intend to create by making each edit?
• What features of the Video editor and audio editor did you find particularly challenging to use?
• If you were to perform this task again what would you do differently and why?
  
  

At the start the film totaled about 3 minutes in length so the most obvious cut was to take a lot of the walking between exhibits out and only show the exhibits themselves. I thought it would be cool to make the gallery seem desolate so I took out every shot where there is another person in it. I cut down the intro pictures display time a lot, I also completely cut out the credits and added my own "thanks for watching message" in place of them while the video is still running rather than a separate image, this saved me some time that I used to display museum exhibits and left the video under a minute long.

I thought to myself all of these exhibits are very uncanny and strange so why not make my video into a creepy surreal one. I edited out all the other people at the gallery so it seems like the person filming was in this building with all this creepy artwork alone. I found quite a dark atmospheric song to make the museum seem more dramatic. I needed a sound effect to introduce the video with I found a gong noise on freesound and distorted it slightly. Near the end of the video where there is a  picture of a banana I inserted an audio clip of a piano chord playing followed by a man saying "'ave a banana" in an exaggerated voice to make a light hearted joke that contrasts with the videos dark atmosphere. I also added an audience cheer that I used in a previous lab to close out the video.

In class the split tool was breaking my video and making the same few frames repeat over and over throughout the video if I used it, this problem was happening to everyone in class at the time, thankfully when I got home my own copy of windows movie maker did not have this problem so I did my work there.
It was difficult to move audio clips to play at the exact point that I wanted but I fixed that when I found the "import music at the current point" option I had to redo the whole video when I discovered this however.

I now know some features about movie maker and how it works with audio, next time I import audio I should be able to do it much quicker than I did this time, whenever I used movie maker before it was always footage of games with my voice recorded over it and there was no need to import any additional audio.

If I were to do this again I would like to try a different video editing software such as Sony Vegas because I hear it has a lot more features.

Image manipulation lab

Manipulating images using arithmetic

Image filtering, enhancement and general manipulation using Photoshop

1)      Find the images on Moodle to be used in this lab and download on to your desktop.

2)      Click on All Programs->AdobeCreativeSuite4ProductionPremium and run Adobe PhotoshopCS4

3)      Use File\Open CH_Tor.jpg to display the image in Photoshop.

4)      Perform Image->Image Rotation->90 degrees CW

5)      Apply a custom filter to the image in the manner discussed in the lecture to filter the image as Filter->Other->Custom

Modify the default Mask to

   -1

-1 4 -1

   -1

What is the effect of the default mask? Why do you suppose that it creates the effect that you see?

Modifying the mask seems to change the image to black and white. In doing so it highlights straight edges with white lines and solid blocks of colour change into black.

6)      Experiment with various masks and explore the use of the preset masks in the High pass, maximum and minimum options. Where possible describe and explain what you see?

• When I increment the radius value of the minimum option the tower in the picture seems to expand and the colour is predominantly black, I think this increseases the size of all the pixels and the black block of colour from expanding black pixels masks the other colours.
  
  
  
  
• The effect of maximum option seems to be the opposite of the minimum one where it reduces the size of each pixel in the image, although it leaves a white outline, this is leading me to believe I was perhaps wrong about black masking the other colours and it's possibly just the opposite of this white outline effect.
  
  
  
  
• The high pass filter makes the outlines of the image glow and turns the blue sky to grey

7)      Suggest possible uses of this filter technique for processing digital photographs?
The most obvious use of filters is to add effects to a whole photograph without taking the time to edit it manually pixel by pixel, that you wouldn't get from taking a photograph, something that makes it look unique.
Since these filters seem to manipulate pixels maybe it can be used to improve the quality of images, perhaps something along the lines of anti aliasing to smooth out a jagged image.

8)      Create a new filter that is all zeros except for the centre value which should be 1. What does this filter do and why?

The filter doesn't change anything about the image, I suspect each 0 means 0 changes  to the image while the 1 in the middle means display the original image and change nothing about it, if I type 0 instead there it would not display anything.

How can you check that it operates as you think it does?
I just compared it with the original image and I see not difference

9)      Create a new filter with a two by two matrix of 1’s near it’s centre. What does this filter do and why?

This filter overly increases the intensity of light in the image this is known as saturation, some parts still remain dark, I think positive numbers in a custom mask amplify the intensity of light the higher that positive number is.

10)  Create a new filter with a two by two matrix with +1’s on one diagonal and –1’s on the other. What does this filter do and why?

Almost every block of colour in the image is turn to black, the outlines of the image are very faintly in white, I think because if you add all these numbers together they create 0 and if you just type in 0 on the filter the image will be covered in black completely, having 4 different numbers somehow lets the image keep its outlines.

11)

I used the colour halftone filter it converts the pixels in the image to a collection of coloured circles that emulate the original image.