Down by the Sea

So yesterday, due to illness, was one of the first over-12-hours edit sessions I’ve done at home in years. Kitten Lorenzo brought a record number of cat toys to the basement, and Vladimir Jack Bauer laid on top of my mixing board, keyboard, and iPhone, with defiance looking back at me to make sure I knew he was being abjurant. I still got my work done. It wasn’t that many years ago that I obsessively edited at home, almost morning to night every day. What changed? Once I started working at the office, I wanted a clear derivation between “work” and “home” I guess. To avoid stress was one motive. Also, the living room used to be my edit suite, and once I was cutting at the office and no longer editing at home, it was time to make the living room livable. I have maintained this mantra even after my “roommate” moved out. Having guests in my home is no longer a source of great embarrassment or shame.

Now, my excitement and enthusiasm for doing more film projects means editing both at home and at work. Right now, I have a PC in the basement, hooked up to a 55″ 1080P TV, and I just setup a 27″ CRT TV to monitor the timelines with. It’s down in the “Library of Rossdonia” with all my books and bookshelves that help buffer sound for the neighbors.

I may even have an editorial intern come here to the house to do some work on FRAMELINES edits. It’s not like it will disturb a girlfriend or anything. Even when I first started to not do as much editing myself, I still had an army of interns coming in to edit movies for other people like ETERNAL, GOODNIGHT CLEVELAND, and MINUS ONE at the house. I miss that. I had purpose, and it’s starting to feel like that is coming back to me.

Other than that, an experiment at work is to take my now defunct laptop and make it a Linux computer for no reason other than the fact that we can read MAC formatted drives and directly transfer them to a PC formatted NTFS drive with one. We had some 35mm film transfers sent to us in HD Quicktime files and we couldn’t get them off because they were too big for FAT32 formatted drives. Even with a direct transfer we had a problem in that the PC’s could not do anything with them. Codecs were up to date with the latest ProRes 422 codecs. Turns out the MAC file names had illegal characters for Windows with colons : and question ? marks. We had to use a Linux computer to change the names and then instant problem solution.