See yourself in this clip?

[Mark Suszko]

Every day.

[Mike Cohen]

“What kind of floor is that?”

“Space floor?”

That’s funny. I’ve always liked Albert Brooks.
It’s great when a film shows you real life. Film editing can be pretty boring to an outside observer.

Reminds me of a particular edit session. I picked up a guy at the airport – he flew in for the day to work on his video. I had already done an initial edit. We sat down in the edit bay and made our edit decisions to the EDL while watching the 1″ of the edit…keep this…delete that…etc. For you kids in the audience, before we have FCP and Avids, we did our edits to an EDL. You wanna know how long the final video is? Ripple Edit. Just save your work because there is only 1 Undo.

But then if you want to watch the edit, you need to Assemble the edit. You load the source tape and let the computer take over. One edit at a time. As this was happening, the guy was getting really frustrated “why can’t we just watch it in real time? Why must we sit here and watch every edit individually?”

Because that’s how it works.

Now you make the same decisions just with different technology.

Great links.

Mike Cohen

[Scott Sheriff]

Mike,
What about checkerboard auto assembles? Even harder to explain.

I once had a producer insist that I didn’t know what I was doing because (on 1″, way before pre-read) he only had an A reel and wanted to dissolve from a shot we just laid (on the record machine) to another shot on his A reel. So I tell him I’ll have to roll that shot off onto some dub stock to do that. “why?, I don’t want to loose a generation” “Just match frame, and dissolve from here (the record machine) to here” (A reel).
My answer “You can’t dissolve to the record machine, you have to have two sources for a dissolve”. This went on and on. Even to the point of telling me that “the guys over at XXXX do it all the time”. Implying that editors at one of the other affiliates knew what they were doing, and I didn’t. Also same guy’s TC’s he logged, were all wrong because they were actually counter numbers.
Funny now. Nightmare then.

[Mark Raudonis]

Must of been before “preread” where you actually COULD do what he was asking… up to a point.

I don’t miss linear editing one bit.

Mark

[Mike Cohen]

My favorite part of online editing was modifying a cuts only EDL to an A-B roll EDL. Then you print out the EDL on the attached dot matrix printer and manually build your B-roll – every other shot gets dubbed, via assemble edit with appropriate pre-roll and time code, to a new reel. That way you can execute an A-B roll edit dissolving between shots from the same source tape.

The best moment of my life was the first time I did a complete A-B roll on the Media 100 in like 2 keystrokes. Can’t do that in Premiere yet.

Mike Cohen

[Scott Sheriff]

Yeah, no preread. No D-(anything) yet.
The dumb things people said, and tricks we played on them could fill a small book.
The kids don’t know how easy they have it.

[Scott Sheriff]

I love the new gear.
But there are a lot of people that the new gear is a crutch for poor planning. In the old days the poor planners were exposed quite easy.

I also crack up when people bash FC as a poor video compositing tool. Yeah, 99 layers that are all 1st gen quality is so limiting!

[Matthew Mcnulty]

just curious what is the movie?

[Mark Suszko]

“Modern Romance”. Oldie but a goodie.

Albert’s movies are hard to find anywhere, a topic he jokes about in his recent film: “Searching for Comedy in the Muslim World”.

My fave Brooks films are: Lost In America, Broadcast News, Defending your Life, and Modern Romance. I also dig his fake documentary piece.

“Oh, you wanted to RECORD that?”