Here’s a little story about a day I call D4, that fateful December Day of Death and Destruction.
Once upon a time, I had massive amounts of data. Tens of thousands of photos. Literally hundreds of days of music in iTunes. Hundreds of videos I’d edited. Media of every sort.
It was December 4, 2010, a Saturday. I remember it like it was yesterday…
For some reason, starting this blog has been bringing up lots of stories and reflections about how editing has evolved since the digital revolution. Here’s another such ramble.
Sometime before I moved from Dallas to San Francisco, call it 2003-ish, I had a series of vivid dreams. I had recently bought my first MacBook Pro, and I suppose it affected my subconscious somehow, because I literally dreamt about it. It was the sole object of my adoration at that time in my life, and I constantly marveled and wondered at such an incredible machine. I took it with me everywhere.
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.
Not to betray my age, but I switched from Windows 3.1 to MacOS 6.something back in like the mid 1990s—long before the iPod days. Avid was the only editing-software game in town back then and it only ran on Mac, as was the case with Adobe software. So, naturally, the entire burgeoning computer editorial industry likewise ran on MacOS, which was the underdog OS and barely supported by any other software manufacturers other than Avid and Adobe. MacOS back then was considered the platform for creatives, and Windows was for business-types, science-types and computer geeks. Those were dark days for Mac users, believe that. There was very little available software, no games (except for like “Myth” and “Castle Wolfenstein”), not even third-party email programs.
Somehow, I managed to pull off both.