Part 5: Second Thoughts

Wow. Several months since any progress. Some family issues and then the holiday season kept me away from the project for some time, and then a new job robbed what little free time I had after that. Anyway, on with the show…

I had completed a rough cut of what should be the first half of the project, encompassing the first film. I trimmed most of the later scenes and even did rough cuts of the major sequences.

A friend let me use his computer recently and I spent some time playing with Sony’s “Vegas Video”, which seemed to be basically a slightly more user-friendly version of Adobe’s Premiere. Even so, it seems a real step up from the free editors I was using and based on my preliminary experiments it will help me give a more polished look to the project. My expectations have expanded as well, and I will hopefully be able to create a 5.1 surround audio mix when the visuals are completed.

Of course, during that time I realized I was going about the process in a slow & inefficient way.

The more professional way to prepare the footage would be to rip the files into AVIs & then ‘frameserve’ those into Vegas…however, I’ve already created all of these little mpeg segments so I’ll live with those, even though they are a less than desirable when using a higher-grade system.

Moving along now.

The entire first two thirds of the story are edited to a reasonably solid state.

We’re all the way up in the story to the climactic final sequence, in which Neo battles Smith, the Hammer races back to Zion, and the city is battling the machine army. Instead of leaving those in sequence, I’ve reworked them to all occur simultaneously. Obviously the most complicated editing in the project…