Software and Equipment You Use

[Noah Kadner]

“It’s less about the hardware, Grinner, than it is about the wetware.
The driver’s the biggest difference between any two race cars on any given day of racing, I think you’d agree.”

Careful- that’s contrary to the ‘conventional wisdom’ in this biz…

Noah

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[Carla Cardello]

So that’s why Avid editors use AE. Didn’t know that. Kinda wondered since there was Avid FX.

I would love to get a mac, but I doubt they’ll let me do a complete system change. Would be nice though!

[Mark Suszko]

I claim to be neither.

[Mark Suszko]

Premiere is available on either platform, mac or PC. At this moment, though I rock FCStudio on an octo-core, I would have to admit the latest Adobe bundled package is superior on a feature for feature basis. Doesn’t mean I’m going out to buy it tomorrow, though. And superiority claims in these things are like tides; they come and go.

Frankly, if I were her, I’d probably stick with the existing edit systems that are already paid for, until there was a compelling reason to upgrade or change. Like ability to compress for web, or use a specific needed codec. For plain vanilla training vids, probably the technical priority should be to streamline workflow and shorten the turn-around time to delivery. That may suggest updates to the storage drives. Shooting with the HD camcorder is going to up your storage needs over SD production. Do you have sufficient scratch drive space and ram for the computer you have? How fast can you crunch a file to put it online or to make a DVD? These are more pressing issues in a corporate setting.

The HD camera will show more flaws in a shot than SD, so better lighting and better shot composition and art direction are going to become needs.

As someone who spends a lot of time making the equivalent of corporate training vids like this, and has for over 20 years, I take exception when people assume there’s nothing “creative” you can do with them. If you have the right idea, you’d be surprised at what the clients will support, as long as it achieves the communication goal. Even on the worst example, the most constrained and limited thing they hand you; there is room to innovate *something* that elevates the material, even just a little bit. When people act like training has to be boring, it’s because they’ve given up thinking about how to make it better. This is not a knock at anybody in particular, I just feel I have to defend my genre’ a little bit from some stereotypical thinking.

[Alan Lloyd]

Is there a turbo-encabulator in her future?