Because of the technical difficulty I experienced with Davidson Domains last weekend, I was not able to post my flog.
This flog is going to talk about my failures making the Remix hack. My remix focuses on comparing Luigi Mangione’s (proposed) sentence to the death penalty with the lack of the death penalty in other crimes like school shootings or police brutality.
My first major setback was trying to screen record videos from YouTube on my computer. It was very simple to crop the video into the size I wanted and remove the rest of the site from the screen recording, but the audio didn’t save with the screen recording no matter what I tried. I googled what to do and everyone on Reddit said that if you screen record on an iPhone in the YouTube app, it will capture the audio as well. This proved true, but it was a tedious task to start the screen recording at the right time on a small screen, since many of the videos did not have an ad, so they just started playing. After what felt like hours, I finally had clips with audio that didn’t cut out the beginning.
The second major issue I encountered was the quality of the Adobe video editing software. The college doesn’t pay for subscriptions on student laptops, so I went to the computer lab in the third floor of my building and logged in, except Adobe Premiere Pro would not open. The computer said that the file it was looking for was lost. That makes no sense. Instead, I opened a video editing software called Adobe Rush, which is meant for converting videos into reel or TikTok sizes after editing. I figured I would just choose not to do that when I saved the video and keep it at a regular size. That would have worked perfectly if Adobe Rush didn’t turn the quality of every clip I uploaded into -1080p. I decided to stop using Adobe Rush because when I tried to export what I had so far, the quality was still very bad and the videos were blurry. I then tried to reinstall Premiere Pro but I couldn’t because I didn’t have the administrator password.
Frustrated, but unwilling to walk to the library, I decided to use CapCut on my personal laptop. It ended up creating a much better product in the end because of the platform’s variety of free sound effects that I wouldn’t have thought to add if I used another software. CapCut also has a captioning feature which allowed me to make the video more accessible. I was looking for a way to add a scrolling screen with my statistics and sources, but CapCut didn’t have that native capability. Instead of using iMovie to add those features, I chose to create my informational elements in Google Slides and then add them as PNGs with background music. I chose to do this because I think it looked better than the iMovie scrolling and slideshow features because they wouldn’t format correctly, and they immediately scream “I USED iMOVIE!” with the identifiable style. Maybe that’s just a me thing.
Another big issue I grappled with was how to transition between clips. None of the platforms had appropriate transitions for the subject matter, so I chose to go without and try to move the clips as close together as possible to avoid long black screens.
