My favorite aspect of EDTC 300 has been the learning project by far. I have had the opportunity to broaden my knowledge of technology by understanding how to edit and create visual media. I took this in the form of editing videos, photoshopping images, and adding effects to videos once they are created. All of these medias have enlightened my view on education by technology and I’m excited to bring this knowledge into a classroom. This is a wrap-up post about my learning project and I’m going to highlight key points that happened every week leading up to this point.

Week 1 – In my first week learning about editing, I introduced my learning project idea and explained why it’s important to me. I added a picture of what my computer setup looks like and described how I would be completing my project.

Week 2 – I used my second week to test out an editing software called DaVinci Resolve 16. This is a free video editing software that I found from a list from Google about the top free editing software’s, and I had hopes that it would help me be successful.

Week 3 – I found that using DaVinci Resolve 16 wasn’t working because the videos that I was editing weren’t uploading. This week I decided to look for some a different software and I thought I’d invest in myself and buy Adobe Premiere Pro.

Week 4 – I edited and uploaded my first video this week! This was a huge success for me and I was so happy and excited to finally see my efforts coming to fruition. This opened my eyes to the world of editing and I really started to become comfortable with the basics of the software.

Week 5 – This week we were tasked with finding a new software to help us out on our learning project journey. I decided to go with another program in the Adobe Creative Cloud, which is After Effects. This app creates edits on finalized videos, meaning words can pop-up in different ways instead of the words just being there, along with other cool features.

Week 6 – This week was one of, if not the most fun I’ve had this semester editing videos. This was my last week on the job and I made some really enjoyable clips that I had a blast filming and editing. This made me realize that if I have fun doing filming, than I will have fun editing as well.

Week 7 – I had a huge success this week because I finally figured out how to add music and other audios to my videos. I downloaded a software that uses YouTube links to save audios and videos to your computer. This was when I started to dive into the harder portions of editing.

Week 8 – This week was a struggle for me because I kind of lost motivation for creating videos due to being laid off and not having much to do due to COVID. My video also wouldn’t upload this week for some reason and it bummed me out pretty hard. I had high hopes for the next few weeks, but this week was a real tough time for me.

Week 9 – Lightening my spirits from the week before, I decided to fire up Photoshop and edit an image for fun. I took a picture of my dog and decided to duplicate him because I wanted to have higher spirits for the rest of this semester. It seemed to help me refocus on the class and the learning project.

Week 10 – This week I worked on the same type of editing skills by adding music, cropping clips, and other easy edits. This video was also tough to film because my work is hard to film at and there isn’t a whole lot of stuff to film. I still filmed some things and edited a video because I want to get better.

Week 11 – This final week of my learning project was extremely fun because I got to edit a video for a different class. I learned a lot about myself editing this video because I needed to learn how to add text and add music and images. This was a very fun video to create and I had a lot of fun editing it too. My girlfriend was in this video and it made it more fun to shoot and edit.

This entire learning experience was one of the best projects I’ve done in my university career. I learned so much about myself and I pushed myself to the best of my ability. I put a lot of time and effort into this learning project and I’m so excited to use my video editing skills in the future. The learning project taught me a lot about resilience and I had to push myself to film and edit every week. The only way to get better is to continue to practice and have lots of fun.

This week was a huge success for me and I learned a lot about editing. I had to film a video for a different class and edit it together. This proved to be a challenge and I had to learn a lot for this video to come out how I wanted it to. Firstly, I had to crop some of the clips down so they sounded more professional and fit together better. This was easy because I’ve been doing this the entire time I’ve been editing. The next thing that I had to do was add music, which was very easy because I’ve done that before and I know what I’m doing. The next task that I had to do was add a photo into the beginning of the video so I could add text over it. This was also fairly easy because I just had to save a photo and to my computer and import it into the media section of the editing timeline. The last task that I needed to do was add text into the video. Now this may be easy for others, but for me it was the first time that I’ve ever done it so I had to figure it out for myself. I found out that there’s a button that you press that just adds text and you can write whatever you want and extend the time or change the font and many other features. This proved useful and I’m really happy I figured out how to do that. The video turned out great and I’m hoping that my professor thinks so as well.

This week I decided to add some music into my video again to practice that. I filmed some transition clips after work and then found another song that I wanted to input there and got it downloaded. This was easier than I remembered and I didn’t need to research anything to make it happen. I worked with it until I figured it out, which took me about 20 minutes to do. I then did what I normally do, which is film some videos at work and a few at home too. I then added them together in the program and posted it on YouTube.

One thing that I discovered while adding this music is that I can make the timeline bigger. The way that I can do this is by dragging the arm that I normally use to slide through the timeline to make it bigger. This means that I can see my entire timeline and adjust it if necessary this way. Another feature that I found out is that I can use the audio from a video, but not the video. The way that I can do this is by moving the video that I want to use the audio from up to a different timeline and by pressing the button that turns off the video. These has helped me a lot this week and I will be using them in the future.

This week I didn’t have any inspiration for filming so I decided to use photoshop. This can be used for thumbnails in videos and they can make videos stand out and be more clickable. I decided that I didn’t want to focus on a more serious aspect of photoshop, so I duplicated my dog. This was really fun to do because it’s something that I’ve never done and it has use in everyday life. The image that I did isn’t the best because it’s my first time actually taking a picture on my own and editing it without the help from a tutorial. In the picture, you can tell that the dog in the back is the one that is added in because of the outline around him.

This week was really fun and I thoroughly enjoyed making this picture. It took me a lot longer than it should’ve to create this image because I haven’t really used this application for a while. In this photo, I also made the grass greener and brighter because it was quite dull and I wanted to brighten the image. This project was fun and I enjoyed pushing myself to be a better editor on a different program. I’m also looking forward to putting out a video at the end that adds lots of the skills that I’ve already learnt.

This week was another tough week for me. I had a tough time filming clips due to me being laid off and not really going anywhere due to COVID. As much as I want to just film myself playing video games or doing homework, I know it’s really boring to see and I’m trying to make the best content as possible. I didn’t learn anything new this week, just revisited some skills that I had practiced in the past. One of those skills that I had to revisit this week was turning one of my clips 90 degrees to be facing the correct way. I then had to change the resolution so the videos fit the YouTube resolution. I had to watch the same video again so I could figure out how to do that again, which was nice to revisit.

I’m optimistic future of my editing skills. I’m hoping next week will bring me more content to film because it’s difficult to film when you do absolutely nothing all week. This week was also really busy due to midterms and other major assignments that I had to complete, so next week will hopefully be much more eventful. I didn’t get the chance to upload a video due to it the video failing for some reason, which was upsetting, but I’m looking into the reasons as to why that happened. I did do editing this week, I just don’t have the video to show for it. Thanks for tuning in for another blog post. I should have another video ready for next week.

This week was a very successful week for me because I had the opportunity to add audio to some transition clips I filmed. I thought this process was going to be extremely difficult because I had talked to a friend of mine who said he spent four hours trying to do this one time. I found this process to actually be fairly easy. I started by searching how to download music to my pc and I found a software that allows me to download YouTube videos and change them to mp4. This is very useful for me because I can edit the audio and make it fit the video that I’m recording.

After downloading this software, I turned my focus to editing the audio when it’s in Premiere Pro. That’s where the video above comes from. I stumbled across this video when searching how to add sound clips to Premiere Pro and it had a nice tutorial on how to edit the sound to do things like fade in or out. This video was a lot of help to me because I needed to cut the audio down to a spot that I liked and this helped me do that. I also needed to mute the audios from the clips that I had filmed, which I had to figure out on my own. My solution was to drag the audio of the clips I wanted muted to a new audio line and mute the whole line. This worked well, but next time I’d like to mute the clips without moving the audio to a new line because I might want to add a few layers of audio onto a clip and I don’t want to run out of audio lines. This video was fun to film and I enjoyed learning a new trick in editing as well.

This week I had a tough time with getting clips and editing because I have just been laid off from work and I’ve lost a lot of motivation to do anything. However, I did make a video, it wasn’t very long and it might not have been my best work, but I pushed one out. I didn’t want to lose any progress I’ve made, so I forced myself to learn even if this week I didn’t want to. This week I didn’t learn anything new about editing, but I got more comfortable and faster with the editing software that I’ve chosen to use.

I decided to put a sketch in this video because I wanted to have more fun filming the videos. I believe a major portion of editing is having fun clips that make you want to edit them and make the best video possible. Even though I struggle this week, I think I came out successful because I finished a vlog and posted it. Next week I will try to make a better video and push myself to use more than just 1 software to complete it. What I’ve learned this week is that I’m capable of editing fairly quickly and that I can do anything that I want to if I just set my mind to it.

I decided to research After Effects as the platform to enhance my professional learning. I did the tutorials so I could see the basics about the app and I was surprised at what could be done. I learned how to have logos fly into frame and how to have words appear from thin air. This is beneficial to my learning project because I can use this tool to put subtitles on videos if I’m too quiet when I’m speaking or I can make commercials for assignments to grab students’ interest. I think class is more interesting when there are videos to introduce topics and show students that school can be fun. The use for this in schools is basically what I sated above. We can create videos to aid students in their lifelong learning journey.

The applications is very useful and has a lot of tools that I explored when looking into it. One thing that I found interesting was the blur feature. I love that videos can have a background blur when you’re creating them because it adds much more professionalism into the final project. Another feature of After Effects that I enjoyed was the mirror effect that videos can have. What this does is it takes one side of your video and mirrors it down the middle to the other side to create the illusion that only the left or the right side of the video is being filmed. I used both of these effects in the video above so if you wanted to see what it turns out like or want to get a better understanding of what I mean then you can watch it. I really enjoyed using this program and I will be putting more time into it as the semester progresses.

This week I was determined to get a video completed and posted on YouTube! The video that I created isn’t one with crazy cool edits or anything, actually it’s pretty basic. The reason for this is because I’ve never had to make videos for any class and whenever I have, they either don’t have to be edited or someone in my group is more skilled at it so they do it. Going from having no skill tp pushing out videos is a real challenge for me, but I’m doing my best and I’m challenging myself to be better every week.

For my learning project this week I learned a new video effect. One of my clips for my video came out as a portrait mode video for some reason and so I was tasked with figuring out how to rotate the clip to be in landscape mode like the rest of my clips. The way that I learned how to do it was from a YouTube video. The action is really easy and I’m starting to get used to the software that I’m using. I had some difficulties transferring some files from my phone to my desktop which was frustrating, but I figured it out and I got a video posted for everyone to see. Next week I’m going to focus on uploading a video and putting a thumbnail on it. I’ve come up with an end goal that I want to hit by the end of the semester, which is to create a short film and post it to YouTube with a thumbnail. I’m excited to keep learning about editing and to take the class on my journey.

As the title leads you to believe, I purchased the Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes programs such as Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects. The programs were cheap because I’m a student and a future educator meaning I got a really great discount for the bundle of programs. I decided to do this because I’ve always wanted to learn how to use photoshop. This will help me with my editing progress because I can spend time making a thumbnail for my videos if I ever decide to post them to YouTube.

I was wanting to upload a video for this week, but the file wouldn’t upload, so I’m going to be posting one this week. That’s the reason this post is so late into the week. I’m going to make a vlog in a different software and hope that it uploads for this week. I’ll be using Adobe Premiere Pro this week to make a video. I won’t be using photoshop to create a thumbnail this week because I want to focus on getting my videos uploaded to YouTube before I can start doing the other tasks to make a video look better. I hope I can be more successful in my future weeks.