13 isn’t everyone’s favourite. For me, it turned out to be one of my favourites.

The number 13 is not a number favoured by many. For good reason of course. But, I am not here to talk about auspicious and inauspicious numbers. It is just an attempt at saying that unlike for many people, Week 13, or the number 13, has been relatively good for me. Turns out, this week was not about just Video editing for a new video. I did more than that. There was software testing and video replication work, which, was sort of looked like menial work, but turns out is quite the patience-heavy work and did teach me about new software and how replicating something is not easy, even with software like Adobe Premiere Pro.

Software testing to replace another software. Takes a lot of patience, and observation.

Apparently, one of the software used for one of the starter packs in this project was deemed unsuitable and so I was tasked with testing a substitute software to see if the same results could be reproduced, and therefore make content changes to the PowerPoint slides that are part of the starter pack. Essentially changing some aspects of the starter pack, pertaining to the new substitute software. The software I was replacing was Autodesk Flow Design. The replacement software is Autodesk CFD 2021. The starter pack revolves around Computational Fluid Dynamics. Therefore, the initial software, Autodesk Flow Design, was deemed not as accurate and useful and I had to test out CFD 2021. I had to test the software and produce similar graphs, models, wind analysis results and coloured tables. Turns out, CFD 2021 took quite a while to navigate, understand and know how to recreate the wind analysis that was present in Autodesk Flow Design. Again, I had to refer to YouTube tutorials to be able to produce the results and I did. I played around with the software and got the hang of it. I then had to make the changes to the PowerPoint slides that come with the Starter Pack, mainly the slides for students and teachers, on the portions about the software and how new results should look like and what are the new navigation outlook and buttons, functions, menu displays, graph settings and more that teachers and students have to take note of. By the time I got all of it right, in the match to what had been done previously, it was taking a toll on me, especially the internet and my laptop, but I did it! Now, users would still learn about Computational Fluid Dynamics, with more accurate and appropriate software, and learn a lot more.

Replicate? Yeah, try and see. Trust me, once something has been done, it is very difficult to replicate it. But you learn along the way.

I was tasked with reproducing some tutorial videos for a particular starter pack. The software involved, Scratch. It is kind of a block programming software for starters in programming and learn to create animations using block programming, which, if I had known about in my primary and secondary school days, would probably have made my presentations and projects way better. Anyways, I tried replicating those tutorial videos by actually recreating those videos on Scratch again, using my laptop’s in-built screen recording, and then edit using Adobe Premiere Pro and even live record. Nothing could beat the original videos, which to me were already in good resolution and in quality. However, Ms Melissa wanted something better but upon me trying out the different methods to replicate and try to create something better, it just could not beat the original and even she saw everything and said, “Nevermind it is okay”. But, from this task, I learnt about how trying never hurts, even though the desired results could not be met, but at least it gave me a new experience and hand at the Premiere Pro software and also was nice to challenge myself a little bit.

New Video. Extension if you want to say. Much more work went into it. Partially this week that is.

So, I had mentioned that I was working on a new video this week. An extension to the previous video I had worked on. This time, this video was around 11 minutes. Oh, I forgot to say, the previous video was around 5 minutes. This video is more than twice that length. And by the time I created the first draft for the video in one day, It took me literally the whole 9 to 9 day to get the first draft ready. And then comments over comments came in and three drafts were produced in the week. I had to put a pause to video editing for this video, as I was presented with the two tasks mentioned above. However, working on this longer video, I did learn some bits about very detailed audio editing and audio editing websites I could use, to actually edit audio to the minute milliseconds, essentially cutting out unnecessary noises and syllabus, to make audio transitions more smooth. I even managed to learn about audio background noise editing, to the point in which White noises in audio can be cut off using Premiere pro’s Audio denoising feature. Turns out, I think, probably professional video editors make use of this denoise feature a lot and that is how we end up with videos that have such nice and admirable audio, without background noise and white noise. I would be working on this long video, more next week. Then, I have another video to work on. So, to more joyful video editing!