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Question for all the pros in the buisness.
Hello everyone,
I am asking for some guidance from all the professional Avid editors. I have been editing for 6 years on FCP and Avid. I worked on spots for film festivals and assisted editors on shows. My question to all of you did you attend school to learn the technical aspect? or did you read books? I don’t have money to pay for school and I was wondering if anyone can recommend me some books on advance avid editing. I know how to do the basic but I need to learn more about the technical aspect and workflows in the professional world. Thanks for your time.
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5 Replies
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Avid Agility by Steven Cohen. You can find it on Amazon.
I learned it all on the job…reading forums like this one like a madman. Work as an assistant in a shop that does broadcast and finishing work. The standards tend to be more exacting than offline.
When I started , NLE’S were just beginning. Little of the technical stuff I learned in school has much relevance in my daily workflow now (except for knowing how to read and use scopes).
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I took an Avid Bootcamp class first. Then worked as an assistant for 4 years. Then, when I was editing, I got pointers on how to do things from other editors. And some pointers on forums.
I am still learning how to do things, and I have been using Avid for 11 years.
The basics I got in a class. THe rest was on the job.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I worked at a dub house for 6 months, learned tape and just about any deck you can think off from 1″ to hdcam SR.
Than worked as an assistant editor for 2 years. The key to that was we did mostly online/finishing and spots. So it was all short turn around stuff with all sorts of different work flows.
The best advice I can give is to LISTEN to people who know what they’re talking about. And ask questions to anyone willing to answer them and Don’t act like you know, if you don’t.
Good luck
Scott Cumbo
Editor
Broadway Video, NYC -
I don’t have any formal education that applies to this industry, but I got into our most significant broadcaster (I’m in the UK) as a technical trainee, so I got a mixture of structured and informal training. That included learning technical stuff in a classroom, practicing techniques in a facility complex that was given over to training and working through training notes on the job, plus spending a lot of time as an assistant working with several editors in the online suites before getting to edit things for broadcast myself (which in my first years was mostly fast turnaround sports).
I remember when Avid came in; the engineers set up the system on a tuesday, a group of us (I think it was 3 or 4) went for a day’s introductory course on the wednesday, thursday morning I exported an edl from the umatic/shotlister offline that I was working on at the time and loaded it into the Avid and started cutting. (I never touched the Umatic offline editing kit again, but I did keep up tape online for a few years as well as non-linear).
What I’ve found is that having had a very thorough grounding in the technicalities of tape online, I’ve been able to “ride the wave” of technical development without any difficulty. Sometimes I have to sit and learn some new stuff, but I’ve never felt that I was learning something completely new – it’s usually a step forward (or more frequently sideways) from what I already know.
The thing I’d say is that the technical stuff isn’t the craft of editing, but it’s the necessary evil that you must know well enough to not have to think about in order to do the editing.
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I just want to add two things to all the good advice here:
1) It doesn’t hurt to join a professional organization like SMPTE, where you get access to tons of technical papers that are generally not available. While there is little there specifically about Avid, you have instant access to a lot of information about CODEC variants, transmission and routing issues, causes of defects and noise issues, etc. You may not be the person who has to troubleshoot this issues, but if you are at or near the finishing end, it never hurts to have an understanding of what is going on.
2) A class or book or two about basic Network structure. Though again, not directly related to the NLE, I’ve found having a fundamental sense of how networks function to be very useful.
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