Q6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

During the process of constructing my media product I used many new technologies. Before my preliminary I had never used a camera and that enabled me to practise with it so when it came to my main task, I had a better understanding of the product. Again, I had never used Apple Macs before my preliminary, during that time I had not grasped how to use them properly but during my main task I learnt how to edit and use the macs. The editing programme's available on the mac's were a new technology to me and again, my preliminary (although the editing on that task was basic) enabled me to practise for my main task.
The benefits of portable camera's was the easy mobility: they were easier to travel with (to locations for filming) than other camera's I had seen before hand. The Apple Macs were beneficial because they have their own video editing programme. The programme organised the clips and made chronological editing a lot easier than it would have been in any other way, the editing facilities within this programme enabled me to edit better than I would have earlier: the fade in and fade out effects used for editing helped us to integrate our music into our media product smoothly. The use of black outs on the programme emphasised the transition from one world (Reality) into another (Fantasy). Another advantage of the new editing programme is that compared to the old way, everything is edited a lot quicker rather than cutting and pasting film reels together. Whilst these technologies had benefits, they also had limitations. The camera's made filming outside difficult, if it was a windy day then the camera would catch the sound of the wind and make dialogue a lot harder to hear (background noise is known as ambience), when using a tripod there are limitations in mobility (a problem with dolly shots) and another limitation of using camera's are the range of shots (depending on the zoom magnification of the camera used). Limitations of the Apple Macs were that there was only one programme to use and this programme only offered certain editing processes, due to the fact that we chose a Fantasy genre our film relied quite heavily on editing – namely special affects, transitions, CGI and SFX (However CGI and SFX are very costly) - the Apple Macs did not provide adequate programme's for us to add special effects and so hindered us in editing.
Other technologies would have made our media product successful. Networked Macs would have made our product more successful because it would then have been easier to access certain bits of information whilst editing our film, easier to upload our product and easier for the public to access it. As said previously, different editing programme's would have made our film more successful, because with such programme's we then would have been able to add certain affects (CGI and SFX), these other programme's could have given a wider range of affects to choose from.