Since it's my second time to edit a video, I thought it would be a lot easier than the first time. I shot the video two weeks ago, and I had run-down and voice-over transcript prepared before I started editing. Everything went just fine, but after I uploaded the video on Youtube, my boyfriend called me up and said there were some really loud background noises at the end of my interviews.
Everything looked just fine in iMovie,the software I used to edit my video, but somehow the background noise always appeared when I watched it on Youtube. After researching it and trying out many different solutions, I finally figured out that the background noise appeared because I fast-forwarded some of my clips, and it affected my audio tracks and made it appear when it's not supposed to.
After all the troubles I went through at 3 a.m., I finally had it done. This time, without the background noise at all. Yay!
I'm happy that we have assignments like this. We not only took different approaches each time but also faced different difficulties when we tried different editing tools and skills.
Every time when I was done with my videos, I always sent them to my family and my boyfriend so they could give me some critiques. As the number of news videos I edit increased, I felt that my skills of video editing and the whole sense of journalism grew too.
I'm very happy to see the changes, and I look forward to doing my third video!
I read this New York Time article today, and I think it deserves a little deeper thoughts about paying for sources. Should journalists pay for their sources? When I first read the story, I thought the minors are being ridiculous and greedy. However, after thinking a little deeper, I come up with different opinions.
First, there's a demand so there's the supply. This is how the economy works, and apparently that's what's happening in Chile now too. From the economic point of view, the accident and the minor workers are now under the spotlight. Everyone wants to know what happened during the time they were trapped underground. But the minors only have limited time (and not to say that they are physically and psychologically tired,) so the demand and supply will reach a balance point where TV stations and journalists are willing to pay, and the minor workers are willing to talk.
Also, if we think we deserve a reasonable income for working, either as a full-time employee or just for a part-time job, the minors think they deserve some money too because they're putting in their time and energy, just like we do at work.
However, these reasons don't back up for the ridiculously high prices that some rescued minors ask from reporters. In my opinion, it is reasonable that they ask for money in return, but beyond a certain amount, the minor workers and their family just make themselves look greedy, especially when they still withhold details after being paid to speak.
Some minor workers are willing to talk for free, while others keep their mouthes shut unless they are paid. It's all their personal choices. I just think people shouldn't judge them just because they ask for money, but at the same time, the minor workers should know that there's only this much that reporters are willing to pay. If the prices do beyond what reporters are capable of paying, the workers won't get the money, and we don't get to know what happened when they were trapped underground. It'll be a lose-lose situation.
This time, I found a very interesting and meaningful video from the C-SPAN online library. The speaker is David Beckmanna, the winner of the World Food Prize. I chose this video because the issue of world hunger is not often concerned by Americans as politics or economic issues, yet it affects millions or even billions of people's lives. Perhaps the issue is not as highly concerned is because most people feel more connected to U.S. politics or economic issues than world hunger. Very true, as a student who is busy with school works and GRE, world hunger will probably not be on the top of my list to pay attention to. However, listening to Mr. Beckmann's speech makes me notice something that I did not notice before. So, even though the video is an hour long, and it doesn't provide as much entertainment as Hollywood movies, I encourage you to spend a little time to listen to what Mr. Beckmann said about world hunger.
Through the whole speech, Mr. Beckmann talked about his experience in remote Africa, and how he believed that Americans should be more active not only in providing foreign aids but also in urging the government to do so. According to Beckmann, the world has made a huge progress in reducing poverty and hunger than in 30 years ago, but more needs to be done. One way to do so, Beckmann said, is through Congress.
Unfortunately, hunger is not an issue only in remote Africa, it's also happening in the United States. I was really surprised when Beckmann provided a statistics that one out of four American kids is living in the household that runs out of food sometimes. Beckmann pointed out that not only foreign assistance is needed but also domestic hunger issue should be concerned. According to Beckmann, the Child Nutrition Bill will expire at the end of this month, and it is important for people to let the Congress know that it is the issue they pay attention to so more can be done for the kids, and also for the poor people.
As I said before, I didn't really pay that much attention on the issue of world hunger. Because of our environment and also because we're so lucky that we never run out of food, we sometimes pay even more attention to the problem of obiesity than hunger. How ironic! We learn how to live healthier by eating a little less or eating more vegetables, while millions of people- including some American kids, according to the speech- have to worry about where they can get enough nutrition to make their bodies function well.
There might not be much that we, as college students, can do to eliminate world hunger for now, but simply by knowing how things are different from our everyday lives makes us less naive, and perhaps we can do little by little to help eliminating world hunger, and to make this world a little better.
I know this happened last week, and I should have uploaded this a few days ago, but it doesn't mean that I should just skip this one and keep the exciting experience to myself.
The brand-new C-SPAN digital bus came to Purdue on Oct. 7, and thanks to Maura, we all had the chance to get on the bus and had a tour with a C-SPAN representative.
We went into the digital bus, and i was so amazed by its interior design. There were comfortable coaches and several touch-screen computers. So the digital bus itself is a perfect conference room, but it also serves as an office with internet connection.
Here are some pictures I took during the tour. If the bus is coming back again, I wish we could see how reporters do their jobs in the bus. I'll be extremely excited to see that!
As I watched many other people's videos today, I had to say I really enjoyed watching them. Maybe we're not as good as professional video editors, and perhaps many of our cameras were set too low for interviews, but as students who just learned to do things like this, many of us at least made the first step.
One thing I want to note here is that the editing process is really fun, but it took longer than I thought. I knew that a beginner like me would take a lot longer to complete one piece, but I didn't expect that even the software I used would give me a hard time.
I decided to use iMovie to edit my first piece because Finalcut seemed too complicated to me. But when I was ready to edit my footage, I realized that all my videos were playing twice in speed. All the badminton players, as well as all the people talking in my video, all looked like hyper cartoon characters. I couldn't figure out why, so I uploaded again. However, it didn't make any difference. After doing some research on it, I realized that iMovie'08 didn't work well with my camera. Yes, not any Panasonic camera, but the specific type of Panasonic camera that I was using.
Thanks to my boyfriend, who downloaded a new version of iMovie for me, I was finally able to play my raw footage in a normal speed.
I didn't face too many difficulties when I was actually editing the video since I wrote down a complete rundown with separated video and audio elements, and a transcript for my voiceover.
Like other people said, video editing could be very frustrating and time-consuming, but when the work was done, I really felt that all the efforts were worth it. It doesn't matter if the video looks professional itself, but just the feeling of achieving something is good enough to keep a smile on my face.
So, after going through all the technological difficulties and hours of uploading, editing, deleting and being frustrated, I finally finished my very first video project!
I know I sound very weird in the voice-over. But please kindly ignore my accent as I believe with more practice and experience, my works will be a lot better in the future.
