Oh, god dammit.

Well. To sum up today in a word, I'd probably choose "disaster".
To get my cinematography (shot on first year equipment, the Canon XL1) onto a PC, I needed a DV Deck.

And now we need to rent them out.

Having rented out the XL1 'til Monday and having a Panasonic 151 rented out from this afternoon until Thursday, I was unable to rent one, and ended up piggybacking my friend Scott's DV Deck rental, having it to myself for the last hour.

Cue a massive problem involving dodgy firewires, dodgy university Macs with Final Cut proclaiming that I couldn't use Scratch Disks, not allowing me to change them.... after a lenghtly bout of "Musical Chairs" in the Mac Lab, I had just over half an hour to get my footage onto a USB to bring home before landing Scott a fine.

After sitting through the capture process (finally working), I proceeded to render my 16 seconds of footage. Mac presets slapped it out at a whopping five gig.
So, I changed the converter settings to "MPEG 2" hoping it would provide (like After Effects, which I've been using for a couple of other projects, VMA and VidEd)

I expected at least a semi-decent render to MPEG-2 as a preset.
I was horribly wrong, the 16 seconds I rendered came out to a whopping 120MB, which, for MP2, you'd expect to be a high quality.

Instead, I now have 720x576, 4:3, disgustingly interlaced and horribly, horribly low quality footage.

I now cannot rent out a DV Deck before the hand in to recover the awful quality footage. Granted, the basics are there, but it looks hideous.

Onto the actual project itself, I realise now that without an actual narrative to be filmed, edited, that it's really rather hard to pull off what Alexander Kaidanovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky acheived in their cinematography. Mine appears, instead, to be just a bunch of establishing shots.
A couple, I could argue, resemble the cinematography occassionally employed by Terence Malick, or, to be more accurate, the indie and "amateur" style of cinematography employed by Laszlo Kovacs in Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, optical flares from the sun, a focus on the natural, the beauty of the outdoors, living off the land, juxtaposed by the ugliness of the industrial, signified by the aging farming equipment I managed to capture.

Unfortunately, due to the freezing conditions and lack of a tripod for shooting, I ended up having to shoot by hand, resulting in a horribly jittery mess that looks more Blair Witch (read, f*cking dreadful) than soviet masterpiece.
So, I guess that through this, I have completely failed myself with a) my choice of shooting later in the year, when Shropshire had snow, and was -6 degrees c in the middle of the day while nursing a cold, my inexperience (coupled with my distaste) of Final Cut Pro, and my rush exporting it. As opposed to working on it as soon as possible, working with the preferred camera and being able to upload DIRECTLY TO MY OWN PC, where I could easily use Avid, as well as the Adobe Creative suite to my full potential.
I've truly shot myself in the foot this time, and regard this as a failed task.

To genuinely improve this task, I could have written a short script. Maybe not even a script, just a miniature narrative, use a couple of friends as actors and shoot that. That way, as with Kaidanovsky, my shots could have had at least a symbolic meaning, whereas my project clearly fails in this regard.