The Gifted Babies

And we’re done.The film has been burnt to DVD and is currently on it’s way to Schull where we hope to make it for this years Fastnet Film Festival again 🙂 . It’s really a beautiful spot in West Cork and definitely worth going to even if you don’t necessarily want to watch the first showing of Hardly Fairest, unfortunately this does mean that the film will not be made available online for quite some time or at least soon after it’s shown in Fastnet. Work has already begun on the next film, without giving too much away I would urge anyone who is interested in knowing what it’s about to … stay tuned. ( I’ll probably change this last bit if we change our mind on what we’re going to do next )

Back to Hardly Fairest, this was our first foray into shooting and editing high-definition footage, and it has been quiet the bumpy experience from a technical standpoint. First off since the original footage was recorded from a DSLR camera, I was working with different ergonomics in mind, I would use my thumb to record the footage while the other fingers gripped to the camera’s side, the other hand would either adjust the focus during the shoot or have the camera held securely since their were no straps to secure the camera with. A bit awkward to work with at first but shooting with a Tripod makes the process substantially easier and it’s easily a deterrent in shooting with handheld, I’m not a fan of doing the latter anyway so it’s no big deal for me.

On the Post Production side of things working with Cinelerra 4.1 didn’t quiet work out so well as I had hoped, although I came across some strange artefacting in the project monitor but when it came to rendering the footage this was where I ran into a problem. Turned out that rendering the footage produced a different set of artefacts in the first five seconds of the rendered footage, the B-Frames ( or maybe it was the P-Frames … ) seemed to have ended up becoming corrupted, creating some very ugly features in the rendered footage. Also on several occasions when I was cutting a few seconds off the video I found that the audio portion had a greater portion removed than the video track itself and causing some sync issues. It was too difficult to come to terms with Cinelerra’s shortcomings, so I switched to Kdenlive instead.

I dabbled with this tool several times in the past and have found it to be quite unforgiving whenever I came across a bug in which case caused several hours of work go to waste. But it’s seemed to have matured since, currently on version 0.7.7.1, it has quickly become one of my favourite NLE applications despite some of it’s limitations, few unwelcome crashes and some niggling issues but on a whole it looks and it works just great. In comparison to some of the other free NLE’s available on Linux, this one trounces them in terms of ease of use and handling of different file types.