I do certainly have a few interesting side-projects on the go – of which there will be more news as it comes. And two of the films I edited whilst at the NFTS are now on the IMDb, so I now have my own page there on which I am described as an editor… which feels good. Almost as if by being described as an editor on that site means that I really am a professional editor from an external point of view. And in such early stages of my career at a really difficult time in the industry, the validation is comforting.

In any case, I have updated my excerpt reel. I’m in the process of making a documentary reel to go alongside it, but this one is for drama and animation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As usual, any feedback is appreciated.

An Avid dongle USB key

http://www.savethedongle.com is a site hosting a petition to save Avid’s dongle-based authentication for the users who rely on being able to transfer their license from one machine to another in the course of their work.

They seek to give the user an option – to follow the software-based authentication proposed for MC 3.5 and not have to worry about losing their dongle and having to buy a brand new system if they lose it, and/ or keep their dongle for authentication.

Plus, you know, it’s called a dongle. We can’t let go of that.

See their website for more information and for the petition.

One of the things which really impressed me was the silicone skins from editorskeys.com – from whom I’d previously ordered some Xpress Pro stickers in my early editing days. They cover Final Cut, ProTools, Premiere, Logic… all of the major ones. And with the silicone skins it’s apparently easy as anything to just swap between them on your laptop or USB apple keyboard, and not get confused by the different shortcuts if you don’t carry your own reverse settings around with you. Which I don’t, and it can take quite a while to even remember how to mark a clip in FCP if I’ve been solely on Avid for a while.

Anyway, here’s a pretty banner and picture if anyone reading is interested:

What I’m now working on (inbetween supervising mixes and onlines where theoretically possible) is JUNK TV, a grad project from the TV department in the form of a 30 minute sketch show. There’s a real mix of studio-based multicamera, location, footage shot on mobile phones, adlibbing…. it’s going to be great fun to cut.

*I say picture locked…. it’s basically at 95%. One of our sequences had music composed very early to a fairly loose cut and when it was trimmed down it lost a lot of its humour. I believe that it’s a case of getting the music to sync again (the composer’s working on it still – it’s the way we do things here), but we may have to look a bit more at the sequence to see if there’s any way to bring certain elements out more once the music’s been finalised with a new tempo