Video Production & Editing from Author Ben Bryant’s “Waiting for Elizabeth”


Here’s a rather bizarre

video production & editing

story from Waiting for Elizabeth. My – by this time – former shrink, Herb Robbins had a local Cable TV show that I’d been drafted to direct. Here’s a brief excerpt from one of the many anecdotes about that show.

“By the fall of ’01 I’d been directing The Mind’s Eye for five years. In October the studio Herb had been using since the inception of the show went out of business. They had given us sufficient notice so that we had enough shows in the can to last for the rest of the year but another venue had to be found. After a week or so of research Herb asked me to go with him to check a studio called Globus.

“Located on West 24th Street, they had two stages and the smaller (less costly) one suited our needs. They had an elaborate computerized switching system run by a portly, disheveled Geek* who talked a good game and made me look like a fashion plate. He assured me that I could sit in the (basement) control room and call the shots and he’d switch on the fly just as it would be done in an analog (non-digital) studio setup. There was something not-quite-right about this guy but this seemed like it ought to work and the per show cost would be okay if we did four shows in a session.

  • Geek used to be a pejorative appellation but that’s no longer the case. Bill Gates is the Uber-Geek.

“When we arrived on the shoot day I was somewhat perplexed by the sight of three different brands of DV cameras in the studio but His Geekness assured me that they would be color and contrast balanced by his high-tech system and in the control room the test shots looked okay. However he was experiencing some ‘minor’ glitches with his computer and they turned out to be so minor that we could not switch the shows live as advertised. We were painted into a corner and the only options were to shoot the shows that day or miss the next air date.

“The plan I came up with was for El Geeko to record my calls on camera framing, movement and switching then manually edit to those instructions the day after the shoot. Seemed like a good idea at the time. We shot four shows and Herb was promised the first one, edited, in two days. Of course there would be no additional charge for the edit since it was supposed to have been done live and was included in the price.

“A week went by and there was no show. The guy should have been able to cut a twenty-eight minute show in a couple of hours since all the decisions had been made by me and recorded for his benefit. I don’t remember how long it took but finally the guy delivered show #1.

“It was a train wreck. His edits bore no resemblance to my instructions.

“A show had to be delivered to the TV station in two days to make the deadline. I got on my bike, went to Globus and got the tapes (for all four shows). It took me five hours of intense work to re-cut one show but we made the deadline.

“Once that was done I edited the other three shows from scratch in about three hours. Goodbye Globus.”

I suppose this could be seen as a cautionary tale in that sometimes you just have to go on despite your misgivings and deal with what comes.

Click here to get Waiting for Elizabeth

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