My Introduction to Non-linear Video Editing

• Posted on 31st May 2016
• in Entertainment, entertainment books, Final Cut Pro, Hollywood books, Hollywood memoirs, Video Editing
• by Ben

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By 2000 it had become clear that I had to find a solution to my non-linear

video editing

conundrum and I was very flustered. Here’s an excerpt from Waiting for Elizabeth chapter 32.

“Anyhow even though now in possession of a DV camera I was still editing on Hi-8 and knew that those days were seriously numbered. But there was no way I could spend $35,000 on a non-linear system. …

“My buddy Phil Sexton saved my bacon. We were watching the Rams beating the Titans in the Super Bowl when he mentioned that he’d read that Apple was coming out with a Mac based editing system called Final Cut Pro. This conversation changed my life. About three weeks later (early March 2000) I was the proud owner of a Mac G4 computer and FCP 1.0. …

“ … And to edit DV there were other things to acquire: a video (as opposed to computer) monitor and a DV Firewire tape deck to get the video that’s on the tapes into the Mac for editing were the bare necessities.

“Software comes with instructions and in the case of Final Cut Pro it was a good sized paperback book. Unfortunately the manual was written by computer engineers – in their own arcane language – rather than by editors and the information contained therein might as well have been written in Korean. So I bought another book: Final Cut Pro For Macintosh by Lisa Brenneis, the only one available at that early date. It was less obtuse than the manual but still hard for me to grasp. After studying both these textbooks for days neither Phil, who is pretty tech-savvy, nor Kevin, a Photoshop expert nor I could figure out how to get the video into the Mac.

“The three of us spent many hours over two or three days in a losing battle with this most basic technique. Again Phil came through. He had a friend who was a recent FCP beginner so I called Glenn Gregg and offered to pay him for a day of lessons. The next day he showed up and the time we spent together was well worth twice the $125.

“Glenn is a very interesting guy. A cameraman by trade, he was always looking for hot spots – wars, riots, demonstrations – wherever there was action, that’s where he wanted to be. Otherwise he seemed sane and he knew exactly the stuff I needed to learn about this new software. By the end of that day I was ready to begin editing. I still had a lot to learn and fourteen [now sixteen] years and innumerable editing projects later I continue to learn. But Glenn taught me the basic basics and it was enough to set me on the righteous path to FCP Editor-hood.

“And it was not a moment too soon because my old friend Bobby Aberdeen got me a very important job.”

That very funny tale and many other video editing and production stories are yours when you click here and get Waiting for Elizabeth.

Tags: Final Cut Pro, Glenn Gregg, Kevin O'Connell, Lisa Brenneis, Phil Sexton, Robert Aberdeen