The final day of my two weeks as part of the Scotsman.com team and it was a late start, didn't have to be in the office until 4.30 PM so I had plenty of time to get myself all packed up and ready for the long night ahead. We were to be filming the debate between two senior Scottish politicians on whether the 300-year-old Act of Union was still relevant.

We checked through the kit and the AVID import once again decided to stop working, but with some frantic button clicking I managed to persuade it to do what it was told. Stewart and I took the kit upstairs to the debating area and planned what to do.

Stewart's attention to detail and 'what-could-go-wrong' strategy taught me a lot as we prepared for every eventuality and got the cameras into position. We filmed an intro with Les Snowdon, the editor of Scotland on Sunday, who had organised the debate, and then we did what any good journalist learns to do - sit around and wait.

We filmed the debate from two cameras, and unfortunatly with the real-time playback, we had a lot of footage to important onto the system. We managed it and with the clock ticking on towards midnight we began to chop the footage down and pick out the highlights for the package.

Much cursing and coffee later, we managed to get the video online at around 2 AM - with no one else in the office apart from Stewart, me and the cleaners. It was great to work against the clock and be part of the debate, the whole article is here. Even though it did mean not getting back to the flat until nearly 3 AM!

My placement has been a good one, and a great insight into how a national newspaper runs itself online…it's taught me a great deal.