We are nearing the end of the project, but a massive problem has recently been brought to our attention that called for emergency. Due to us uploading all of our cutaways and simply taking them, a lot of us have found that the same clips appeared multiple times through interviews. As our lecturers have pointed out, this is very problematic for a live brief as people may notice the same cutaways being used and this would look very unprofessional.
The most sensible thing to do would have been for us to make a list of each file and then find out who is using which file. The problem is that quite a few people did not actually name the different video clips before putting them on the server. I had named the ones I captured and because I liked to work in an organized way whenever I imported a cutaway file I changed the name so that it would reflect the content. This means that at this late stage it wouldn't possible to check the cutaways by file name since they are no longer consistent.
We have devised and employed 2 systems to deal with the issue. The first which I proposed was for everyone to take screengrabs of all the cutaways and upload them to the server whereby I produced a sheet of thumbnails (eliminating repeats) and then printing it off. The idea was then for people to write their names next to the thumbnails of the cutaways they would use. It is now easier to identify them by looking at the thumbnail than file names, and having the names listed next to them allows people to know who they need to talk to in order to decide who needs to change their cutaways and which ones they can use. The second system devised by Jack Wells allows us to check used cutaways from home by setting up a blog where the whole class has authorship rights so we can post the cutaways we have used and leave comments to negoiate conflicts.
We now have very little time to make changes but we are trying hard to ensure that our videos have very little repetition of cutaways.
