After all this time

After so many resource posts, time to talk.

Years ago after moving to a new school I was confronted with the task of assisting a student with editing a video submission as part of the HSC Body of Work. Up to that point I had not had to handle anything like that, but I figured it couldn’t be too hard. I had taught myself Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, had a working knowledge of Logic, Cubase and FL Studio and worked with procedural and fractal landscape generators like Terragen and Mojoworld, so finding my way around a new interface shouldn’t be all that difficult….learning curve No1.

I had just stepped into a Mac environment and was discovering a mini version of heaven. Having been a long time PC user who had just crossed over I certainly welcomed the opportunity to get ‘under the bonnet’ and learn more.

I cut my teeth on IMovie HD, (I still keep a copy because it’s the only version that can export to mini DV). The student I was working with was not mine, but was an HSC candidate of another teacher in the faculty. However, I had her in my Design class and this was where we worked on solving some of the technical problems that turned up in the process of the work being put together. I quickly learned the basics of editing and this student was fast in picking it up, and in a very short time had a substantial amount of footage to work with and a head full of ideas that quickly exhausted the editing capability of iMovie. So the next logical step was to upgrade to Final Cut HD and relearn. This was possibly the best thing that could have happened.

Having the basic principles of editing under control it proved to be substantially easier to move across to a new interface and multi-layers. The addition of Soundtrack and Live Type made the crossover even more pleasurable. However refining the process to the point where I could fluently instruct someone else, meant long hours after work sorting out all the pros and cons of codex related issues and the finer points of the craft of editing. No one told me how time consuming it would be (and still is).

Putting the soundtrack together meant taking my iMac into school and working with her there. Using an extensive library of royalty free loops, the piece came together with relative ease:) and the ability to sync video and audio in Soundtrack took the strain out of the final edits. As far as I remember the soundtrack had something like 15-20 seperate tracks………….there was some very interesting dialogue in the development of this piece.

Exporting the completed project to iDVD proved to be an interesting experience. The 06 version of iDVD had some interesting idiosyncrasies and again provided another learning curve that was relatively painless but time consuming for both student and teacher.

So here it is, (from 2007), a small part of an extensive body of work comprising photography, graphics, video and an interactive website and my initiation into the world of teaching video editing.