Journal #1

It's been about two weeks since I first got my hands on a version of Avid's video editing software. At this point I feel like I know what I need to know and not much else and what I need to know isn't much to speak of.

Here's how business is running at the Giants Edit Suite:

- Three guys are down in Spring Training with the team in Scottsdale shooting video

- That video gets dumped on to giant hardrives

- The hardrives get sent to us at the ballpark

- We catalog all the footage and transcribe all of the interviews

It's tedious and boring, but completely necessary. The guys in Scottsdale are shooting what amounts to be a season's worth of footage or close to it. They're shooting all the content that will run during our between inning features on the stadium jumbotron and interviews for online only features and two separate 30-minute shows to air on Comcast in the coming weeks.

Here's where I come in. I along with two other guys are coming through the footage as fast as possible and cataloging all of it so we know exactly what each clip is, how long it is and where to find it to make it easier for the editors to find stuff that is applicable to the various projects they're working on. As such, I've learned the basics of how to play/pause/rewind/fast forward and how to navigate through and create the various headings we need to properly catalog the footage. I've also learned how to use the script function, which allows us to actually include the transcriptions with the video clips themselves, something we've never done before. However, there is a huge flaw there, something which I discovered earlier this week. The script function only allows you to write 1026 characters, which means many of the interview responses don't fit. Thus, we're back to the old system of doing everything in Excel.

Slogging through all this footage should be the pattern between now and the end of the month. Hopefully, I can sink my teeth into the actual editing aspect of the program at that point.