Video Editing: Final Cut Pro Virgin


Being new to computerized

video editing,

by March 2000 I had slowly and painfully learned the basics of my new non-linear video editing system, Apple’s Final Cut Pro. I immediately needed it. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 32 of Waiting for Elizabeth:

“[Producer] David Weinstein, hired me to shoot and edit a sales demo for the show. … A mix of comedy, music, magic and juggling, it resembled classic vaudeville and was designed to appeal to the senior citizen demographic – which it did. …

“Late in February I … shot two performances with two cameras. Then it was time for (gulp!) my first actual FCP video editing experience. …

Video editing setup 2008

This is my video editing setup seven years later, much more professional.
On the top right you can see four of the five external storage hard drives.

“Once the footage was all in the Mac we began to edit. Even being new to the system this was much faster than the tape-to-tape method and better yet was the fact that changes could be made quickly and putting things back as they were after a mistaken choice was not only possible, it was easy to do. So the basic cut went – to my amazement – quite smoothly.

“But… There’s always a but.

“Once the order of the clips was set, re-set, trimmed and finalized we needed to add some ‘bells and whistles’. Here was where the learning curve took a steep upward direction. It was also where the engineering language versus editing language had its most profound impact. For example: David wanted to superimpose the cover of their program over a short montage and have it grow in size until it filled the screen. So I looked in the manual and the book indices for the terms used in photography to describe making an image larger. ‘Enlarge’, no luck so I looked for ‘blow up’. Again, no luck.

“I don’t remember how I found the 2-pop forum but it was a god-send. (The name derives from the 10 second countdown at the head of a movie reel and the audible pop at the number 2.) It’s an internet forum for FCP users where one can post a query about a problem and get an answer or answers. … Anyhow, I signed up and asked the question about blowing up a frame. That’s when I realized the previously mentioned engineer/editor linguistic differentiation. In FCP the term was ‘scale’ as in 10% scale, 115% scale etc.. Once you learn that it makes sense but I would never have thought of it. This is but one example of the problem but you get the idea.

“David was a player for sure. He sat next to me with both the manual and the book open and would look stuff up while I played with the controls trying to make things happen.

“He’s a cool and surprising guy. When I met him I thought he looked like a banker, all dapper in his three-piece suit. Then he showed up at my place to edit in jeans and leather jacket, sat down and pulled out his stash and began to roll a joint. I assured him that smoking some reefer was fine but I declined his offer of a toke. Trying to learn FCP while stoned would not have worked for me. We spent a lot of time together for a couple of weeks and I got to learn a lot about his multifaceted background.

“David had a wild and wooly youth. I may be misremembering some of the details but as I recall he was somewhat of a hippy, doing a lot of mind-altering substances. Then he got into fund raising for various activist causes. At some point he dropped out and bummed around Europe for a while with the likes of William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg. When he came back to the states broke in the late ‘70s, on his first day home he got a call from a political group that was looking to hire a fund raiser. He needed a gig so badly that he didn’t care the color of the politics and thus a former psychedelic refugee joined the team of Ronald Reagan.

“Mind you, these stories rolled out over several days with tasty tidbits spicing the conversation while searching for information on how to make an image rotate as it moved across the screen and such like.

“Once Ronnie was ensconced at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue our dope-crazed weirdo found himself working for the President of the United States. How bizarre is that? David told me … “

… lots of inside stories about the Reagan administration which you’ll enjoy, along with many tales of video editing and production, when you click here and read Waiting for Elizabeth.

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