Tools of the Trade

In this post I' am going to discuss all the software and hardware I used to create my project. I will also discusses what web functions I used to find information and inspiration. First I am going to talk about the hardware then software.

No matter what you create in media you are going to need good quality equipment, otherwise you not going to get a good quality product. To create a teaser trailer, poster and magazine front cover your going to need a few essential pieces of hardware.

-A high resolution HD video recorder
-A high resolution SLR digital camera

-A computer with decent graphics card and processor in order to edit your photos, clips etc.

For the majority of the time I was doing most of my editing on my laptop which is an ASUS GH73.

Specs
Processor = Intel Core i7 Q720 1.6 GHz
Ram = 6GB DDR5
Graphics card = ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB DDR5
These specification are more than enough to let me edit both clips and trailers without any freezing or glitching.

For the camera I used my schools media departments Cannon SLR EOS 40D camera, this allowed me to take high resolution photos that I could edit later.


Its important to use a good SLR camera otherwise you will not get high resolution photos. When it comes do editing your photos and combining more than one image together if your not using images at a high resolution they will become very blurred when you try to re size or manipulate them. This wold give your work a very unprofessional look. So its very important to use a good SLR camera to insure that you get those high resolution images.

For the video recorder I used my schools media department's HD recorder which was a Panosonic HDC-SD5.

Simllar to the SLR camera for photos, you need an HD video camera in order to get high resolution clips that will give you a professional look. There is nothing worse than a film that blurry or out of focus.

To create my poster, teaser trailer and magazine front cover I used two pieces of software.

For editing my clips to create my teaser trailer I used Corel Video Studio Pro X2.

I originally wanted to use a professional video editing software called Sony Vegas Pro which would have allowed me to manipulate the video clips so i could add things like gunshots and bullet effects or even explosions. Unfortunately it cost around $600.00 US dollars, me being a media student theres no way I could afford it. So I used my schools video editing software Corel VideoStudio Pro X2. I am going to start off by saying that I would not recommend this video editing software to anyone. Its so frustrating use and work can easily be lost if you don't follow very specific routines. But I wont complain to much because I did help me create what I think is A reasonably good trailer. It does have a wealth of features for editing clips and sound and then combining them together. Its in no way a bad piece of software, everything an A2 students needs is there, just no enough functions that I wanted.

For editing my poster and magazine front cover I used Adobe Photoshop CS5. This a piece of professional software that allows any one to create a professional looking product relatively easily. It allows you to re size an image in any way and manipulate any image. You can then combine images on to one image and using a layer system you can keep track of them, place one image over another and edit several images on the same main image. Its ideal for for editing images, creating poster and magazine covers.

I used several different types of web functions. I used google to search for various images and trailers to get an idea of what I wanted to do for my project. I also used google to find good filming location in Dubai and the Middle East. I used Youtube to search for various trailer o get inspiration and find out what makes a good action thriller teaser trailer. As you can already tell, i used blogger.com to write up my notes in blog form so that everyone can have access to them and see my creative process throughout my project.