It's been a long time coming, actually. I tried working on it with Final Cut Express, which I had pre-installed on my iMac when I bought it, but what Apple doesn't tell you is that Express is mainly kind of like a glorified iMovie. Sure, it has most of the bells and whistles Final Cut Pro has; but it has a massive drawback in that it can ONLY work with digital video camera formats. No .mov, no H.263 or H.264, nothing. Therefore, in order to try and edit anything in real time, you have to have it either in a DV format or spend literally HOURS re-rendering from whatever format you have as an original into a DV format to work with.
This pretty much makes Final Cut Express a non-functional video editor for my purposes.
Now that I have Final Cut Pro, things are different.
And, without all the tedious hours of re-rendering, I found Final Cut Pro to be exceptionally easy to use in its basic ways.
So I set up a new project, imported my recorded game footage by dragging all the movies I recorded into the project, and got to work. Working with my first clip, I set the in and out point and dragged it to the timeline, at which point FCP said the timeline wasn't in the same format and I should automagically make it the same format, which I did. At that point, the video was able to be modified in real time without any rendering. The audio needed to be rendered, but that took about 10 seconds.
Since all my clips were recorded in the same format, this was the same for every clip. This made learning some of the finer points of FCP a lot easier.
I quickly learned how to adjust the volume of the clips so it was less than my voiceover, and learned to ensure that I didn't put the clips in a spot where their audio would break up my voice over audio, which I had pre-recorded and imported. In hindsight, since FCP has a record voiceover option, I will probably just use that from now on for a few reasons.
First, rendering the MP3 I used for my voiceover seems to have added some artifacts into it which were not in the original recording. Second, if I didn't place the clips in the correct part of the timeline, they would break up my MP3 and I would have to manually set it back into position. Third, rather than try to match the clips I make to the audio I pre-recorded, which didn't always work as I had intended, I can instead work with the clips I have in the length I feel is appropriate, and record my voiceover to them. This may mean slightly longer reviews in some cases, but with more practice I feel I can shorten clips down to exactly what I need to keep the reviews concise, yet informative.
I was also able to test layering of video, which is actually how I did the opening titles; by layering the larger UTGR font typing out over top of the smaller font printing out the entire words. Also in the opening sequence of the review, I layered another clip over top of the Unitology message and stripped its audio out so that it didn't interfere with the Unitology message. Lucikly, I also happened to place the clip that went over the Unitology message precisely where I wanted it on my first drop. Beginner's luck, I suppose.
All in all, I found the actual real time editing to be a lot easier than I thought it would be. It took only about 2 hours to edit the entire video, which may sound like a lot, but editing always takes a while. It just gets faster once one learns the tricks to speed it up and as one becomes more comfortable editing.
The Dead Space 2 review is a little longer than it possibly needed to be. For most games, I should be able to do the complete review in 5 to 6 minutes. I pretty much need to cut down on how wordy I get when writing my review script. Again, a learning process. As time goes on and I do more reviews, I'm sure I'll find a happy medium between video length and what I say in the reviews.
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