Toucan Sam wrote:Thank you very much (all of you), especially mirkosp, for making it very so very easy for me to comprehend. Unfortunatly, my school is very new (made a year ago), so I cannot receive help from an a/v club. Fortunatly, I had already played around with many of the programs available for windows (GIMP and vegas). Thank you all very much for your support!
P.S (major props to the creator of the linked guide. Very simple, Very effective)
My school was only half built when we moved there from an older building. There was no A/V club until my friends and I decided to work with the school district to get one. Actually the A/V thing is a bit of a joke, we actually did have a cooler name: Broadcasting Vocational Program. However we had a trump card: the city provided the guy who ran all their programming on the public access channel. His name is Phil Rogers. He is one of the most important people in my life. Today, in fact, is his birthday, and I sent him a video for it.
We started in a utility closet with a couple of SVHS decks and JVC cameras, a semi-sorta anchor desk. A few months later, Phill worked his arse off so we got our sweet, sweet Mini-DV JVC cams, and two beautiful wonderful, Windows 2K machines running Premiere 5.0. The good times of cursing premiere as it crashed, or did something squirrelly or just refused to work at all never stopped. And premiere still treats me the same way today. Ah, memories. We won national attention for a documentary we did on teen drinking and driving called shattered dreams and it was shown on Good Morning America. Then people started paying attention. People with MONEY.
By the end we had an entire lab built, with several workstations (now they're all macs, at least they were two years ago when I last visited the high school), a full featured radio station, an anchor desk with blue screens and green screens... And wonderful, amazing, Canon DV cams worth $5000 each. I miss those cams. ;_;
Did we edit AMVs? Yer damn right we did. But the editing skills came first. The ability to take what we had learned and use it in our future careers is also very important. Most of us have gone into some sort of technical field. I edited professionally for politicians for a few years. I think it might be more to your benefit to form an Animation Club, with an emphasis on the creation/editing aspect, which will impress your teachers and your district, and get you some much needed CASH. Back in my day, anime was not well known, so we needed to come up with lots of standard stuff (good for demo reels for job stuff), but you might have better luck now just skipping Live Action Broadcasting and focusing on animation, digital effects, etc. But maybe a Broadcast Club in general wouldn't be bad idea.
Get the school to pay for your legal copy of premiere.
Mine did.