Spend the afternoon in the office editing today. Was cloudy and raining most of the day. I often walk out to the office's lobby while I'm waiting for a tape to transfer or something to render. I like walking out to look at the flags fly or just the clouds drifting over the horizon.

They're flying the Jalur Gemilang at the lobby for the 50th Merdeka celebration. It's going to be a year long celebration. For me, there's no Merdeka... it's more work!



This is my little 'cell'. The AVID Newscutter suite. Not the best of the AVID range of non-linear editing suites but it gets the work done. Personally, I wouldn't buy this with my own money. I'm more of a Adobe kind of guy. AVID only works great in a broadcast television station. Anyway, I usually like to spread all my notes all over the table when I edit. It lets people know that the room is occupied if I leave it for awhile. I can't stand working at a table that's too orderly either. I like it a bit messy so at least I don't feel the pressure to keep things tidy. I know, it's wierd.





The first thing I have to do when I get to the editing suite is plug my hard disk into the PC. I bring my own hard disk now. Too much risk of loosing data when I used the share data server. Things just get deleted on their own by 'ghosts'. I like the casing I got for my portable hard disk. This Hard Box is really durable. The hard disk inside is actually the C drive from my old PC before I upgraded it. I formatted it and it has 150GB of space in it. Currently standing at 24GB of free space. Time to clear some junk.




The other things to do when I first get into the editing suite is check on the digital beta deck. It's old 70's technology but still being used by my office. This one in particular has a jog shuttle that drives me nuts. I have to slap it really hard to change jog modes.

The old machines have a habit of chewing up tapes and not liking even the slightest bit of error on any of the tapes. If the tape condition starts flashing red... you know you're in for a hard time.

Sometimes when I stare at the controls of the deck, I imagine this is what the control panels of the Starship Enterprise looks like. Checking the audio levels; checking timecode and what not. First time I saw this deck, it was the most complicated piece of machinery I've ever seen. I still don't understand most of its function. It's like secret levels of a computer game.

Now I hardly edit deck to deck (linear editing). I used to be really good at deck to deck editing. There's still quite a lot of people in the office who prefer linear editing. It's pretty archaic by today's standard already though some see it as an art form.

At work I try and promote non-linear editing but for certain things, linear editing is still the best and fastest!