February 22, 2012

Workshop #1: Workshop with Jake

Jake and I had a one on one workshop one day after class, that proved to be very insightful. We went over several video concepts, and I must say that I even impressed him more than a few times. The first thing he showed me was how to capture good video with a camera phone. He told me how to properly hold the phone between my fingers to reduce the heavy shaking effect that I tend to get when I hold things at what I believe to be an even level.

After that he asked me what I knew about cameras and lenses. I couldn’t remember a ton of details from my days as a yearbook photographer at Freedom High School, but I remembered enough from the D600 to be valuable asset to any team when we do our full projects later in the semester.

Jake refreshed me on the workings of iMovie as well as teaching me the pros and cons of Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. The latter being his program of choice. I explained to him the heavy lag I experienced when using Final Cut Pro. Apparently it takes a computer with a lot of free space to make the program run smoothly.

After that we got into a few more technical things. He explained to me that it is good to avoid using background music in a lot of videos. He also explained how to effectively frame things and know when videos are getting too long. Keep them between 2 and 4 minutes. 4 being the absolute maximum. All in all I think I learned a lot from Jake as well as refreshed myself on a lot of concepts.