OVERVIEW

The scenes were rendered (compressed as Sorensen 3 QuickTime files) and imported individually into Adobe Premiere ready for editing. The editing process was gradual and took over a month from start to finish. This involved the arrangement of several video and audio tracks. The video tracks were rendered Max files (now QuickTime files) and the audio tracks were wav files created in FL Studio and Sonar.

Adobe Premiere is designed around a timeline format similar to Macromedia Flash where key frames and tracks are used to arrange different parts. The video files are imported from an external folder and dragged onto the timeline where they can be selected and moved or altered with various effects. I had used Premiere before on a 3D group project prior and for a sound module so I did not have many problems when arranging and manipulating the tracks.

Before committing to a finished edit I created a mock up version of the film with rough cuts and quick render QuickTime files. The scenes used no lighting or effects and high-polygon background objects were removed. Only the key scenes had full animation, the others used still objects with a moving camera (to suggest the directing approach). By using this approach I created a rough guide which I could refer to when editing the full movie and features such as timing of scenes and music, animation fluidity and the duration of the film could easily be identified and addressed.

Below are two screenshots of how I edited together the film. The turquoise green tracks towards the bottom of the timeline are the audio tracks and above them are the video tracks. It was difficult to cut scenes from the film, but because of the already edited version being over 8 minutes long, I had to sacrifice a number of scenes which I believed were irrelevant to the story or did not communicate with the audience.

Compression

As I have mentioned in my monthly progress report form (April 2005 available in the Appendices on the DVD) I had problems with compressing my movie. As an uncompressed QuickTime movie file my film is just over 3.5GB which is obviously too big so I experimented with the compression options available in Adobe Premiere. I found that the DivX compression gave me a small file size of just under 130MB but the quality of both the video and audio was affected. The smoothest compression came from the Photo Jpeg compressor (please see image below) and the Motion Jpeg A compressor that reduced the file size to just under 800mb without affecting the quality too greatly. But I then managed to reduce the file size to 300mb using an MPEG 4 compression with little distortion to the quality. To watch the finished movie, please see ‘downloads’ under the ‘making’ section or alternatively it can be found on the DVD.