I’ve been thinking about my recent FCP rant, and it brought to mind a (hopefully shorter) related story.

For New Years 2000, some dear friends and I traveled to the UK and I shot about twelve hours of footage on MiniDV tape.  A few months later, I decided to edit the footage down to about 30 minutes or so, and give DVD copies to all of my friends who went.

These days in the age of Vine and Youtube and phones with tiny 1080P cameras inside, such projects are simple.  Back then, it was a huge pain in the ass.

Apple had not yet released Final Cut Pro after the purchase from Macromedia.  While Adobe After Effects was coming into its own as a great design tool and even a finishing machine, Adobe Premiere—on which I had originally learned nonlinear editing in film school at the University of North Texas—was simply a terrible program, and very expensive to boot.  I had no option but to edit my project on an Avid at the post house where I worked, which was actually not altogether uncommon for editors to do.

Back then, I was working at a small but very busy shop in Dallas.  My boss agreed to allow me to edit my project on the weekends, though stipulating that all of my footage be deleted from the hard disks by Monday morning.  Fair enough.  But this essentially left me only one weekend to edit the entire project, as Avid did not yet have a great solution for archiving footage and I would not have enough time to digitize twelve hours of footage twice on two different weekends.  (Who remembers “digitize”?)  Not to mention that MiniDV was not remote-controllable by serial connection back in the day, so digitization would be freehand and completely inaccurate.  Remember, there were no disc-format cameras back then, only tape-based cameras.  So there was no importing files for editing.  All footage existed on tape, whether MiniDV or 3/4″ or DigiBeta, and had to be digitized in real time.  In other words, if you had twelve hours of footage, it was going to require at least twelve hours to get the footage into the Avid for editing.  And that was the problem—the digitizing was completely inaccurate and would take so much time that it couldn’t be done twice.

That meant I basically had one shot at the edit.  So I spent the entire weekend at office in front of my Avid.  If I didn’t finish, I would have to delete and start over again.  There was no other way.  The technology just wasn’t there.

It was summertime in Dallas, and my office’s building air conditioning was turned off on the weekends.  It was incredibly hot inside, around 90 degrees.  So I tucked myself away in a back room and locked the door, and edited day and night, wearing as little clothing as possible and dripping with sweat.  It was truly a labor of love, and only the thoughts of my friends’ excitement at receiving this video got me through that miserable weekend.  I worked constantly, sleeping here and there and praying that my coworkers didn’t show up and bust me there at work half nude.  I did finally finish at about 9PM on Sunday, hallelujah.

But, omg, it was SO damned miserably hot!!!  That Saturday evening at about 2AM having worked for 30 hours straight, I’d become somewhat delirious from dehydration and was staring at myself in a pool of sweat which had accumulated on my desk, glowing brightly in the cathode ray of the dual super-VGAs.  i was waiting for some effects to render and was nowhere near finishing.  And I said to myself there in that puddle of sweat, “Man, this sucks.  One of these days, I’ll be able to edit at home completely naked where there’s a/c and cold beer, and then I’ll be a player…”

And look at how far we’ve come!