Toolkit
These are the things which I own which I see as somehow relevant to editing, as of the date the page was last updated.
Purchased November 2008, 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 320GB Serial ATA @ 7200 rpm, 17-inch Hi-Resolution, LED backlit Anti-Glare Display, NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 512MB, 4GB memory.
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For the majority of the editing work that I do, Avid is my cutting tool of choice. I prefer it for its use of modes – and do find an existence without a decent trim mode difficult now that I’ve become accostomed to using it. The death of Avid’s Xpress Pro range meant that it was time for an upgrade, and I was already aware of a few of the key differences from digitising work.
*Academic Version – cannot be used commercially, only for experience. I’d love to be able to afford the full thing, but it’s not happening just yet.
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This is really a fantastic package – Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Compressor, Color, Motion, Soundtrack Pro…. I’ve had a fair amount of experience in the first three, but I don’t even know where to begin in learning the others!
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This is my desktop publishing/ internet machine. It runs on Vista, and would probably flat-out refuse to edit anything more intensive than an image in Photoshop elements. But it’s a very useful thing to have and run various low-resource software on when keeping one machine solely for editing and associated tasks.
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Contour Shuttle Pro v.2 (previous post)
I’m still loving this little gadget, to the point where if I’m doing any task repeatedly in Avid or FCP I’ll be sure to map the keystrokes to a useful button. It’s a case of using it when it feels right – mostly when scrolling more than keypressing.
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Western Digital MyBook 1TB drive (FW400, USB2.0, eSATA)
All of the projects I do get consolidated to this baby for at least a while afterwards. Unfortunately the Avid won’t recognise it as a drive to create media on, but there are generally ways around that. It’s also been an essential part of carrying around and backing up a 15 minute TARGA sequence which was part of the graduation animation film at the NFTS.
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Not so much a part of the edit suite, but really handy to pick up programmes and films from television that I miss because I’m still editing at night. I’d hate to be one of those people who couldn’t watch television or film any more because they work in it. I’m here because of the love I have for both.
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I went through phases of wanting to go the Blackberry or Nokia communicator route for my next phone, but then the 3G came out and just made the other choices look antiquated. The interface plus the appstore for specialised functionality…. there was no contest. It’s fantastic for keeping up with emails, twitter, checking out prices of things online when wandering around shopping and seeing gadgetry that you want…. And there are some pretty useful apps out there – iTalk for recording guide voiceover and Byline for keeping up to date with job RSS feeds (via Google Reader) stand out in my mind. Plus all of the games whilst rendering, of course….
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