Final Cut Editing

Though the ancillary tasks have been our focus for the last few days or so, we still have one particularly pressing issue on our minds - the completion of the video proper. Now that the audience feedback has been fully digested, it is time to press on with the completion of the full video. It gives you an added bit of motivation (not that we need any extra) to know that you are so near to seeing the video and all of the ideas that went into it being completed and coming fully to fruition.
The first and probably most important bit of editing still to do is to actually fully implement the overlay effect onto the entire video. Here we ran initially into several problems, chief among which was that, on the original settings we had planned to use (see the Video Effects post), due to the camera footage quality, the image badly distorted in some places, and certain colours began to look very odd. Therefore we decided to experiment a little more with the colour settings of the overlay.
Here is a screenshot of the modified overlay settings. The settings use a combination of low blacks (to bring out the shadows in the background) and high whites to brighten the contrast up, as well as very low saturation.
Here is a the method used to implement it onto the entire video, to save time having to implement it onto each individual clip. This screengrab is taken right at the point that the overlay effect is being dragged and dropped onto the sequence timeline.
Below are several screenshots of our results.

As you can see, the distortion is minimised, and actually in some cases almost blended into the feel of the video overall, whilst the colours give the video a very cold feel and look, but there is just enough colour left to give it some life. Also, the overlay emphasises the blacks and shadows, to such an extent that when there are moments of brighter light, they appear to brighten on-screen as the video plays, giving it an extra effect and feeling of life and vibrancy in amongst the cold greys.
Also, you may notice that an MTV2 logo has appeared in the top left corner of the screen. This is part of the finishing touches we are applying to the video, to give it that final look of a real music video, by giving it the appearance of how it would look if it were to be aired on a typical rock/alternative music video TV channel. Below are several screenshots showing how it is implemented into the video.
The first shot is the original logo, and as you can see, the vertical dividing bar and the 2 are invisible here as the background colour of this image is white, but in reality it is actually clear, meaning that when the image is placed on top of another colour, whatever the background colour is will become the background colour to the logo, so as you can see in the screenshots from the video, when implemented onto the black part, the whole logo shows up nicely. Below are the settings applied to the logo to place it in the video.
As you can see, the main adjustment is in scaling down the image to fit into the left corner of the video and to the appropriate size of music channel logos, as they appear on screen during broadcasting.
The last element to be applied is the faded in and out song details that appear at the start and end of the video when it is broadcast on music TV channels. Now, we first decided what details to include, and in most cases, the details are shown as follows:

Band Name
Song Title
Record Company
Year of Release

This is how the details looked having been created in Photoshop.

Next stop is it's implementation in the video itself, and for this we used the same option as for the MTV2 logo, but also applied a subtle drop shadow to it using this option in Final Cut below:

Below here is a screenshot of the timeline with the MTV2 logo and the song details applied to the video, and below that is a screengrab from the video itself showing the logo and the song details as they would appear in the video. With these edits complete, plus a few minor edits based on our audience feedback, we will finally be complete with our music video - happy days!

More to come...