[Chris Raines]

Good advice. I’ve met with pretty much every post house in town, and haven’t had any luck. I’m pretty confident in my abilities and skills, but I’m starting to feel like being in news has been a strike against me, although perhaps not intentionally on the part of would-be employers.

It’s kind of disheartening to think that I’d have to start all over being an assistant editor or something after 6 years of experience.

[Chris Raines]

Franklin – Thanks for the advice. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing over the past 4 months. I’ve probably met personally with 80% of the production places in town and I schedule meetings every week. They were all very gracious and gave me their time and advice.

I completely agree with you that everyone had someone else take a chance on them at some point. So basically I’m trying to increase the probability for someone to take a chance on me. It’s turning into a LOT of work, but I’m confident that it pays off.

[Chris Raines]

Grinner – Good advice, although I’m not sure how viable an option that is right now. Which is unfortunate because it does decrease your options. There is plenty of opportunity in my current market though (Nashville), so it’s not like I’m in Laramie,WY. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to get a foot in the door.

J Cummings – I’ve knocked on almost every door in town, and I didn’t feel a bias against newsies right off the bat, but I suspect that it’s there, just because news is “quick and dirty”. That is also the thing that makes it hard to show a good reel, because everything I work on is done in 3-4 hours from capture to output. Could I work on a 30 sec TV spot for a week and make it look fantastic? Sure! But I can’t prove that.

I’ve been doing spec stuff for the last few months, including a couple of EPKs for independent artists, which I think gives my reel a different look at least…

J Cummings, how did you make your transition? Was it working with a prod company full-time or freelance?

Thanks for the pointers!!

[Chris Raines]

Computer is first gen Macbook Pro 2.17 GHZ 2-core. 3GB RAM (upgraded from 2) Operating system was recently upgraded to OSX 10.5.7. Quicktime is 7.6.2. Final Cut was freshly updated as well to FCP 7 (although the sequence in question was edited intially on FCP 6) Half the clips were captured using a DVCPRO deck, the other half were captured directly from a DVX100. All the clips say “DVCPro” as the compression. I’ve exported from this project before using FCP 6, and had no problems.

I should also note that when I export to Compressor or use the new “share” command, it gives me the same problems.

Thanks for your help