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      01-16-2021, 12:40 PM   #1664
dogbone
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Quote:
Originally Posted by vreihen16 View Post
If your VTR was a reel-to-reel B&W unit and you know how to clean crud off of the flying heads in an emergency by placing your finger over the slot on the head drum unit with the heads spinning, you are welcome on my lawn.

If your greatest production work is stored on 3/4" U-matic, you may visit my lawn...but don't sit down.

If you ever wrote a grant for $300 to buy *four* BLANK VHS tapes, you may view my lawn from the curb. (Yes, $75 for a T-60 tape back in the olden days.)

If you know what "Never The Same Color" means, you probably spent way too much time in a two-deck studio editing videos back in the day.....
haha ok I've got a little anecdote that will have me reminiscing a bit. Don't know if it will allow me to get on your lawn. I'll get my beer and lawn chair just in case.

In March 1994, Avid Media Composer was not a thing yet. Shows were being edited on tape.

I worked at a post house in Washington DC that did the audio-post for the tv show "America's Most Wanted" (AMW). AMW was creating a spinoff for the international market called "Manhunter". Manhunter was sort of a recap show. Basically, they took all the old AMW segments that led to the capture of a bad guy----here's a bad guy we want to find, here's some new info we got, we got him!, here's his sentence, etc----and they edited them down into one cohesive story. And then they took a bunch of those stories and packaged them into shows and sent them overseas. And you know what, the show was a hit. Turns out people outside the USA were fascinated with American baddies.

Manhunter was the first television show that anyone tried to edit with Avid Media Composer. And they decided to edit the show at our post house. In a way, it was sort of a real world beta testing. Avid had a test engineer quit Avid and go to Washington DC to be the editor of the show. They used a Mac Quadra 950. They used 15k Raptor drives in RAIDS in air conditioned closets. And they had to switch RAID drives between show segments because there wasn't a chance in hell you could put a whole show on one set of drives. And they had so many damn problems---bugs bugs bugs. And---oh my god----the render times for graphics and transitions were insane----like walk away for hours insane. We're talking about things that an iMac can do in HD in realtime with no rendering now. But that was the unofficial beginning of the digital age for professional video.

My first job ever as an audio editor in 1994 was editing music into those Manhunter episodes. Pro Tools was just starting its journey and wasn't ready for daily television work. We were doing digital audio editing on an AMS Audiofile and mixing on a Neve Logic 3 digital console with full automation. Man, that was some groundbreaking stuff. And expensive--like $200k.

The professional highlight of my life at that point was when I was given this jacket! Back in the day, industry guys would kill to have one of these. Now, it's very sentimental to me. It reminds of me of the scratching and clawing I did to get into the industry.



Once Avid and ProTools got up to speed in the late 90s, the whole industry went through a fundamental shift. Video editing rooms didn't cost $3 million dollars to put together anymore; it was $150k for an Avid. And audio post rooms weren't $750k anymore. A Pro Tools rig was $50k. At those prices, any decent sized production company could put their own stuff in. Work dried up in all the post houses and post guys like me had to adapt and go in-house at some place that used to be our client.

Watching the digital age come about in the entertainment industry was pretty fascinating. I learned a lot. Ultimately, I quit being a post mixer and started my own trailer music library. Been doing that since 2006.

Ok that's enough geezing. I think I'll go do something on my race car to make myself feel young! Actually I was supposed to go to the track today, but they didn't get enough sign ups so they cancelled the day.....ah Winter tracking in Colorado.
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