So, our shooting escapades went well on Sunday as it turned out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Yesterday, my new Mac arrived. For the first time in the history of Macs-I’ve-Owned, this one is of the desktop variety. In other words, the hard drive doesn’t drag the overall speed of the rest of the system down into the gutter like George W Bush at a speaking-English-correctly convention.
After gutting my Macbook Pro for anything useful and transferring it by gigabit lan (speedspeedspeedspeedspeed… I’m sorry, what? I got sidetracked with awesome) to my new system, I began to install and configure Final Cut Studio and other useful things like that.
After this was done, I plugged in all the external hard drives and opened up my previous project. I’d been waiting to get this new system, you see, before trying to edit the work from last weekend. And, as I started to yell from the roof-tops at the beginning of this post, it turns out we don’t completely suck balls after all.
Coverage of the scenes was done with the lapel mics (fortunately, the materials worn by the actors this time DID NOT suck horribly, and there only two people talking at any given point in time) with a bit of backup provided by the boom.
And the best part? I didn’t have to resort to the boom sound ONCE. The radio sound was so sharp that I jammed a compressor over each track and simply ignored the rest.
However, that isn’t the real fun part.
The real fun part was this - I was able to use Final Cut Studio PROPERLY. No more screaming, “you’re doing it wrong!” at myself while finding kludgy ways to avoid adhering to the methods explained in the enormous four-volume Final Cut manual.
See, my old computer was Too Slow(tm), and I also hadn’t sat down to READ all the blasted manuals, because I got my proper boxed copy (yes, that’s right, I pay for software) right when I was sitting down to edit the crap out of my first feature film. The net result was that, embarrassingly, I’d never figured out how to merge video & audio tracks in FCP. How bloody embarrassing! So, as a ‘quick fix’, I merged them manually in a sequence. So, thusly, scenes in my flick became sequences-within-sequences-within-sequences until I’m sure the unholy God of Final Cut Pro was wincing and rolling over in his grave.
Now, half-way through I learnt the Correct Way To Do It(tm)… but it was too late. Half-way through editing a feature film is NOT a good time to pick a whole different bloody paradigm.
But starting new short film projects afterwards? That’s the best time.
So, using only singularly-nested sequences this time, I was able to send complete scenes over to Soundtrack Pro and, y’know, let it do what it was BUILT for. Leveling and Sound FX placement all got done in Soundtrack Pro and between this and the fact that we got bloody good coverage on Sunday, the simple fact is that this is probably the single best stuff we’ve shot.
Of course, the material might not be to everyone’s taste, but at least this project will be aired on Australian TV rather than some of our random earlier stuff.
I shall finish this collection of connected paragraphs with a quote.
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee - I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can’t get fooled again.”
– George W. Bush
(What? I didn’t say it was going to be related. I just find anyone who can have the IQ of a boiled walnut and still get elected for two four-year terms fucking hilarious)






