Pilot Marathon!!!

I've spent the last three months working on Pilots. Tons and tons of them. I had one pilot I directed and wrote last year for a new take on a PBS show Southern Fried Fitness. We were retrofitting the show to be ready for Prime Time TV. These new pilots are from Taillight TV. They are known for a large number of live shows in and around Nashville as well as shows like Day Jobs for CMT. I can't really talk about them in detail, but it's been great meeting the team over there and helping them get some more shows off the ground and up and running!!!

Premiere CS6/Final Cut X

I've been editing now for over fourteen years. I started on the old tape to tape which was terrible, but moved up to Final Cut when it first came out. I've been an avid Final Cut user since. A number of my clients used Avid, but to me it was always clunky and more like using a horse and carriage than a race car. "It's always been this way" was almost a war cry with Avid users. I told one of them, "If I had a heavy box sitting in the living room that needed to go to the attic and I had my grandmother sitting on the couch and my brother, who is a football player, who would I ask to help?" Sure they could both get the job done, but seriously.

Well, as we all know, Final Cut made some changes a couple of years ago. I liked a lot of the deep system changes, but the one horrible mistake that they made, borrowing from iMovie. I detest that application in every form and in every version. From the minute control to the over simplified Fisher Price editing windows. When I saw the new screen shots I almost started crying.

If we step back to my earlier analogy we can add another element. Aunt Gretel (Final CutX). She's the one that always treats you like you are a child and tells you were to put everything and how to put it and how to pick up the box and how to name you pets and how to feed your pets and... all you wanted to do was get the box upstairs. I like a lot of the elements that they added to Final Cut and I can see how it will eventually be the app that I use, but I don't like being told how to name things and where to put it. I need control.

Enters Adobe Premiere. Now I need to just mention that I have never ever liked Adobe Premiere. It was always clunky and felt more like trying to push a giant ox up hill then a proper editing app. It looks like this time around they finally took a cue from Apple and made an app that people can use. It's got lots of great features and ways to organize the timeline and elements. It still feels a little clunky, but much more forgivable and I think they can work these little kinks out by CS7. Plus, with Adobe Cloud, it was a no brainer for me. A number of the production houses that I work with have switched to CS6 and Premiere. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. I'm still pulling for Final Cut X. I'm just not using it... yet.

Alona Raevska "Destroyed"

We finally finished! I've been working with Alona on her video for her song "Destroyed" for over a year. We were creating it in our free time and knew we wanted to shoot during different seasons and around the globe. We has over ten locations on two continents. It's a performance video that I shot on the Canon C300 and the Canon 7D and edited on Premiere. You can check out the final product here: https://vimeo.com/56431125