Monday, March 30, 2009

Editor Stories

Here are a couple of editors writing about their experiences, from the upcoming 2008 ACE Equipment survey.

A story from Stuart Bass on the perils of the editor having too many tools:

"This was the first time I cut a pilot and was offered no post-production support. As an editor I was responsible for CC, ADR, music editing and tracking, sound effects, the mix and many of the blue screen visual effects.

With some discussion I eventually got a music editor and supervisor and someone to help me with color correction. However, after I locked the director’s cut, my assistant and I undertook a week of work that is usually reserved for specialists. As a result I worked over the technical aspects of the show so deeply that I no longer could make “objective” creative decisions as we progressed through the studio / network notes. At times I felt I let down the producers and director because I could no longer make aesthetic choices. The act of going through the show frame by frame working audio levels and color for days at a time takes one’s head out of the story."

Tim Squyres on working remotely:

I did the (feature) assembly at home with software only Composer on a Macbook Pro with external FW  800 drives, while my assistant digitized in New York on a Nitris system. Every afternoon a runner would come out to my house on the train and we'd swap hard drives, and I'd give them any DVD's I'd made to be sent to the director. Occasionally, if time was tight, I'd have my assistant make the DVD from bins that I'd sent via iChat. It takes a little extra effort to be sure everyone has the right media and bins, but it's nice to skip the commute.

I have and older SD Mojo, so I could have down-converted to DX and worked on my larger client monitor, but I chose to work in full screen on my computer monitor in HD, without the Mojo. I down-converted only to make the DVD's. For the first part of the job, the Mojo was unsupported anyway, due to the Leopard Firewire problem that we discovered beta-testing last spring on a job that I'll send a different survey about. In early January, the director wanted to go skiiing, so we rented a Mojo DX, update my Firewire drives, and I took my home system to Lake Placid for a week. No problems.

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