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Brave new world. Again.
Just had another “wow, has it changed” moment of the past 30 years…
I’ve been on location for the week, shooting & editing a wrap-up film for large corporate conference closing session. Needed to check out of the hotel room on final day, before the edit’s finished, or even approved, so I move to the lobby coffeeshop to set up the “edit suite”.
Here’s the “moment”; I’m sitting there working on motion graphics, color correction, and edit tweaks, rocking out to music, moving along about as fast as I can think of ideas, and I realize that, other than the slightly hard chair I’m in, this is as efficient as any edit suite I’ve ever had. Not only that, in front of me on the little table is something like 14TB of drives, with a Thunderbolt RAID edit drive, a music library of over 3500 tracks, 100,000 sound effects, media readers for P2, C300, and DSLR… AND ROOM LEFT OVER FOR MY COFFEE.
The Chief of Staff for the Big Guy comes over 30 minutes before airtime, puts in the VModa headphones, and watches the cut on the MBP Retina 15, with a growing smile and “Awesome” at the end.
High fives, and switch to the next project, with a fresh cuppa.
Complain as we might, and should, about how the current crop of tools can be better, but no matter how you slice it, it’s a pretty damn fun time to be an editor. Quite a long way from waiting for engineering to show up to patch your extra channel of ADO…
“Constituo, ergo sum”
Bob Woodhead / Atlanta
CMX-Quantel-Avid-FCP-Premiere-3D-AFX-Crayola
“What a long strange trip it’s been….” -
94 Replies
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That’s funny – just this morning I was thinking about when I used to edit a 30 minute sports program with over 75 source tapes in multiple formats………ugh!!
“Waiting for engineering….” LOL!!
anickt
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Or hard-rolling a 1 inch tape machine, then running across the room to hit Record on a Beta deck, because Engineering was too busy with their coffee and cigarettes to do it right.
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
I remember traveling with no less than 5 huge, giant, heavy cases to go do a remote edit.
Now I can go with a backpack and another carry on. Today, I couldn’t get those heavy cases on an airplane if I tried.
There’s a lot of talk around here about Apple providing incapable machines.
The retina MacBook Pro is nothing short of amazing for a such a small package.
Sure, it might take a little bit of retooling the external parts, but so what. There are new tools evrywhere, retooling is the nature of production. I agree with you, it is rather remarkable what can be done these days. It’s no fun to be scared of it.
In my opinion, FCPX is purpose built for a more modern setup. It is light and efficient, but for certain workflows, it could also serve to have a huge wad of processors thrown at it.
You can do so many things concurrently with fcpx, and it is built to let you do all these things at once. As good as the i7s are, it makes me think that Apple had more than Quad cores in mind when conceiving this application, and as you have astutely pointed out, there’s still room for coffee.
Jeremy
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Ahhhh, c’mon. Don’t you all long for the days of a flatbed that takes up a whole room and weighs more than a pickup truck? A/B Rolls? Scratch tracks? Fullcoat? And expensive work prints followed by a mega-expensive answer print?
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But don’t you miss the exercise?
Walk across the room to switch tapes in the decks.
Walk over to the still store.
Walk over to the character generator
Walk over to the copy cam stand.
Oh, one of these decks is not working. Pull it out of the rack and carry in another one and cable it up.
Remember holding that deck while trying to line up those rack rails. You didn’t need the gym.I guess I will have to get my workout on my mountain bike these days
: )
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After waking up to find that 4 AE renders failed and I’m supposed to upload to Vimeo in a few minutes I kinda wished I had a graphics guy to yell at or fire. But still, I agree.
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The Ae fail sound is one of the best in the business.
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Apple is ignoring professionals. There’s no way I can hook up and control the Ampex AVR2.
I think you exemplify the modern editor and the future.
I think the reasons for the “big facility” are declining (although certainly still needed for efficiency in some cases).
I think you exemplify why Thunderbolt is not an after thought.
While there may still be a few years to go, I think the facility as we know it is going to fade away.
I think the biggest roadblock are the problems in moving large files quickly and I think we are on the cusp of seeing professional solutions in that area. Even if those costs may seem relatively expensive they may compare well to the costs of maintaining a facility. -
I like the AE complete chime better. But damn is it loud sometimes. I was sleeping during the fail sound I suppose. Lately, if a drive or the system is allowed to go to sleep, AE fails it seems. Then I come in (downstairs) in the morning and wake up the system and AE picks up and starts rendering again. In 17 years of doing AE I’ve never seen a system go to sleep while AE is rendering. After all, it’s doing something. It’s not idle. Something is wackly with the latest mountain lion and AE / sleep.
And yes, I forgot to turn off sleep in the energy saver settings last night.
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I miss hanging mag tracks. Nothing like 16 or more gigantic machines spinning reels of death! And what fun I’d have when a track would break. I still have some scars from those things. Apple needs to get it together and provide sync lock to mag machines in FCP X. It’s just not professional without it!
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
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