Editing of a Different Kind

You might have noticed I tweeted (twitted?) some stuff yesterday about a Final Cut Pro system I went to look at and then purchased. Yep. I'm now a proud owner of a Final Cut Pro video editing system.

I realize this isn't about the kind of editing I wrote about recently, that is, editing our images to, hopefully, identify the best from our photo shoots. Nope. I'm now writing about another sort of editing: Video editing.

What does video editing have to do with glamour photography? Probably not much. Except, of course, if you're soon to produce a glamour photography DVD and you'll be needing to edit the footage you'll be shooting for said DVD. (Makes me feel so lawyer-ly when I use words like "said" in said context.)

Video editing isn't something new for me. I spent years working as an editor, a video editor. I owned an Avid Media Composer for many of those years and, in fact, I still do. Except my Avid is now a hi-tech dinosaur, its fossilized remains kept under lock-and-key in a storage facility I pay $160 a month in rent to maintain, i.e., to store a bunch of crap that, at the end of a year's worth of storage fees isn't worth what I paid in said storage fees. (D'oh!@# I said the "said" thing again!)

The numbers look kind of similar--if you squint your eyes--between the purchase of this Final Cut Pro system and my Avid. I said "similar" not "the same." My Avid cost over $100K. The FCP system I purchased yesterday cost $1100. That's only a difference of a couple of zeros, right? Granted, I bought the Avid system new and the FCP system is used but, "Day-am!" Those two zeros are BIG zeros!

I spotted the FCP system on Craigslist. It had just been listed. I called and it turned out to be an editing system owned by a production company now on hiatus. They had recently finished their season of shows for Spanish language television and were getting rid of some gear that was about to collect dust for a number of months. The FCP system--they have three systems but were only selling one--was part of what they were looking to get rid of. The price was right so I jetted to Burbank to have a look and realized, upon checking it out, it was a good deal. So, I plunked down 11 pieces of paper with Ben Franklin on the front and walked out with the system.

The executive producer, the guy I bought this gear from, threw in the workstation the FCP system was sitting on. Nice. According to the EP (executive producer) I bought the FCP system from, it was eleven hours from the time he listed it and sold it. He told me lots of people called and one guy came in just before me but the guy was a little short of cash. ($300 short.) So, he took off to hook-up with his girlfriend to borrow the three bills but the EP warned him that, if someone else walked in with cash before he returned, he was gonna sell it. Only minutes after the other buyer walked out, I walked in--with the cash--and walked out with the system. Guess it was meant to be if you believe in that stuff.

Okay, so now I have a Final Cut Pro editing system composed of a Mac G4 dual-processor tower with ample RAM and storage, two 22" flat-panel, LCD, wide screen Samsung monitors, a Mackie 1202 VLZ Pro mixer, and a pair of Roland speakers. Besides FCP, the G4 has a whole bunch of other post-production software loaded on it. They weren't selling external storage with the system. No problemo! I already have some Medea Firefly drives that are designed for use with digital, non-linear, editing systems via firewire. Amongst other things, these drives spin faster than normal drives which can be important when you're through-putting that much data at 30 FPS. (Frames Per Second.)

I also already own a Mackie mixer (a Mackie 1402 VLZ Pro) as well as a pair of Roland speakers. They're buried in the storage room with my Avid's remains. Guess I'll sell one of the pairs of speakers and one of the mixers and that will reduce the cost of what I spent on the FCP system. I love it when shit works out this way.

I don't expect my learning curve to be too steep. After all, I edited on Avids for many years and Adobe's FCP interface looks a lot like the Avid's. I haven't been on a Mac in 5 or 6 years so I'm gonna have to de-Windows my brain a bit but that shouldn't take too long to accomplish either. I'm thinking a week or two playing with my new toy and I'll be ready to rock-n-roll. Unfortunately, my new Mac doesn't have PS loaded on it so I'm gonna have to do something about that.

The pretty girl at the top is Persia from this past Monday's Day of the Dread Brick Wall. I screwed with the colors on this one as well. Persia, as you might guess, is Persian. BTW, "Persian" is what Persian-Americans refer to themselves as, as opposed to Iranian-Americans. Can't blame 'em. The Islamic Republic of Iran is, historically, a rather recent invention while the country formerly known as Persia is/was a multi-millennium-old civilization, culture, and people. If many Persian chicks look like Persia, it's yet another good reason to agree with President Elect Obama that we should be talking with the (Persian) Iranians rather than shaking our dicks rattling our sabers at them.