Production Blog: I Finally Chose an Editing App!

 We officially have a winner! However, before I reveal the editing app I chose I’m going to go through the criteria and the testing process for each of these apps. 

The first app I tested was OpenShot, because as I said, I’m not paying for videopad or any other sort of editing app. Upon opening OpenShot, I was greeted with a familiar interface, a bit crammed, but nonetheless familiar. I input a test shot into the app and attempted to find a way to shift the color balance, exposure, color temperature, or something that would enable me to create the look of night. I looked for a length of time so long that it would be embarrassing if stated exactly how long, so i’m not going to go into specifics. Needless to say, I was not going to use OpenShot for this project. 


Next I moved onto ClipChamp. It was so simplistic and intuitive, it was honestly a dream. I managed to create a fairly realistic effect of the video being filmed at night. To be more specific, I first decided to lower the exposure, so that the overall scene would be much darker. I then lowered the saturation, adjusted the color temperature to be cooler, so the overall scene would lean towards blues, as the moon tends to reflect blue light. Then, I adjusted the contrast to what I thought would be best. This created a wonderful effect of nighttime, but I wanted to push the colors just a little more. I saw that ClipChamp had filters, so I looked through them and I was torn between a few. There was a green-blue duotone, a pink-purple duotone, and a pink-blue duotone that I could have used. I eventually decided that the green-blue duotone would be best to push the colors of nighttime, without being too unrealistic or obvious. 


Moving past day-to-night editing, I also needed to focus on ClipChamp’s ability to create the transitions I needed to create. Luckily, they were easy! In order to create a dissolve, I just need to ensure the videos are on different tracks and overlapping. Then I can fade each of them into each other and it’ll create the effect of a dissolve. Fading is also intuitive, I just need to make sure the next few frames are blank and create a fade. 

Overall, I’m very excited to finally have an app that will actually work well with my computer. The next few blogs will be editing blogs, so stay tuned!


Pictured- A screenshot of ClipChamp's interface





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