When Life Throws You a Curveball - Edit! Now with the iMac Pro
Jim Draper
Editing has been a love of mine going back to the time I discovered what you could do with a razor blade, scotch tape and 8mm film. Getting a Moviola, splicing block and tape gave me an outlet to express my creative ideas. Rough cuts are the only way to describe my early works - like this high school modern media project from 1973:
Titles and music were added for a high school reunion years later. At the class showing, I played Santana's Soul Sacrifice from Woodstock - on a cassette player -as the soundtrack, it timed out perfect!
In college, I discovered audio editing, mixing and video production. The tools to tell a story changed but assembling the final work had the same thrill. To see how these tools have evolved over the decades is truly mind boggling. The equipment needed to run million dollar post houses now reside in a computer that sits on your desktop. The image quality of cameras that cost well into five figures is far surpassed by today’s mobile phones (with the exception of the lenses). What doesn’t change is the skill of the videographer and editor to tell a quality story.
If you follow my blogs, you know the bulk of my work in recent years has been directing live event productions. As that work has mostly ceased because of Covid-19, those shows are being replaced by studio and in house productions. As those productions need editorial work it seemed like a good time to invest in a new edit system.
I’ve been editing on Macs for over 10 years so when the old iMac started choking on 4K footage or multi-layered video, my decision landed on the iMac Pro. I’m now enjoying the speed of a 10 Core, 128GB, ProVega GPU, 5K display computer. The primary software I’m utilizing is Premiere Pro, After Effects and Photoshop on Adobe’s Creative Cloud platform.
My first edit project with the iMac Pro was for HC2 Productions last month. Directing several days of studio shoots for their Fortune 100 client, I let producer Carol Caron know I was available to edit. With the tight turnaround time for the scheduled streaming event, Carol had me collaborate as one of the editors. In these days of sheltering in place, daily edits were uploaded to the cloud for viewing. A well received program had more viewers on the stream than were originally scheduled for the live event (which was cancelled due to the pandemic).
One of the silver linings of the pandemic has been the time made available to restart a documentary turned TV series project - A Backstage Pass: From the Crew. Originally conceived by my good friend and colleague Doug Murray, we’ve joined forces with director Paul Harris whose documentary concept Stagehands will be the pilot for the eight episode series. Please watch the trailer for Stagehands and visit the GoFundMe site. Most edit sessions happen over Zoom with a shared screen so Paul and Doug can view my timeline:
Premiere Pro TImeline
Stay safe, wear a mask and see you on flipside of this craziness - if I’m not directing or editing for you in the meantime!
Jim