Mike Cohen's Blog

Ok, so you have decided to edit a video in Premiere Pro. For the sake of argument let's pretend you are using 2.0, which is rather similar to CS3.

If you are coming from AVID or Final Cut, you may be surprised to see some of the choices Adobe has made in their features, or lack of a few seemingly key features. Believe me, you can get used to anything, and once you do, it's no big deal.

Coming from Media 100 there were a few features I could not believe Premiere was lacking. But Media 100 used to cost $10,000, Premiere is a $800 program.

Ok, let's back up.

Before you even import any media, you need to get comfortable with the interface. 2.0 and CS3 have adopted the interlocking windows of all current Adobe products. If you move one window the adjacent windows move in proportion. It reminds me of one of those puzzles where you have sliding boxes which when unscrambled make a picture or a face. Hey, remember those toys with the man's face and the magnetic hair with that pen...I get easily distracted, bear with me.

If you are using two monitors, or one large screen, play around with the window positions and save your workspace. The default editing, audio, color correction workspaces which come from the factory are ok, but you may find something which works for you. I seem to save a new workspace every few weeks. On my laptop, which lets me plug in a external monitor, it has been a bit tricky. The widescreen laptop screen only goes up to a certain resolution, while my external 19 inch monitor has a higher resolution.

Once you have a workspace you like, set your preferences. Given a Windows computer's propensity for crashing, I like to set my autosave interval to 5 minutes and the number of saved projects to 50.

A final custom setup is your keyboard preferences. you can in fact learn about features of Premiere by studying the keyboard preferences menu. The Adobe manual is certainly of little help (ouch!).

The default keyboard shortcuts may make sense, for example I for mark in and O for mark out, but you should do what makes sense for your mind-finger connection. As mentioned above, I used Media 100 for 5 years, so my brain became accustomed to the non-customizable keyboard shortcuts for the most common editing commands. Thus, I setup the Premiere keyboard as closely as possible. That way I do not have to memorize very many keys, as they are second nature.

You can purchase pre-labeled keyboards, reminiscent of the old Sony 9000 edit controllers, but again, the commands are pre-set and non-changeable. Once you memorize the key commands, and in reality your fingers have a memory of their own, you don't even have to think.

I set the most used commands so that with my left thumb hovering over the space bar, my left ring and middle fingers rest over the W, E, S, D keys, with easy access to the 1,2, F1, F2, F3, F4 keys. My right hand is usually on the mouse. I have a Microsoft mouse with two assignable buttons near my thumb, which I have assigned to + and - for easy zoom in and zoom out. Oddly, the Microsfot Intellipoint plugin can make Premiere unstable, but boy are those buttons convenient. When my right hand is not on the mouse, it hovers over the arrow keys, with easy access to CTRL / which is my razor tool.

The final useful buttons are the J, K, L buttons which are play forward/shuttle, play backward/shuttle and stop. These are factory default and they somehow make sense.

In case you are wondering, here is what I have my other favorite buttons do:

1 - insert 2 - overlay F1 - mark in F2 - mark out F3 - go to in F4 go to out

W - target higher video track S - target lower video track

E - target higher audio track D - target lower audio track

CTRL D is a most used command to assign the default transition at the current edit point on the targeted track, and CRTL SHIFT D for the default audio transition.

V, N, C and M/Shift M are useful commands as an alternative to clicking the toolbar.

Don't forget to save your keyboard profile for future use.

These few setup routines can really improve your efficiency, save you unnecessary mouse usage and reduce editing time.

Now, if I could only remember the keyboard command for "windows XP, please don't crash."

Thanks for reading.

Mike Cohen

No offense to the many awesome FCP users, but I have noticed these blogs are a bit light on Premiere Pro posts.

I thought I'd write a series of Premiere Tips and Tricks, great for the beginner and hopefully interesting reading for everyone else.

A Brief History of My Experience with Premiere

Back in 1995 we decided to investigate nonlinear editing. At the time, we were running two Ampex 1" suites, one with a 2 bus Vista switcher, the other with the old standby Grass Valley 100.

We visited Expo95, the annual Connecticut video expo, this one held at Quinnipiac University's Ed McMahon School of Communications. At this expo, we evaluated the IMIX VideoCube and the Radius Telecaster. Am I stirring up any happy memories for anyone yet?

The VideoCube was very Media 100-like - a so called "finishing system."

The Telecaster, having nothing to do with Fender guitars it turns out, was a hardware based plugin with Premiere 3.0 (?).

We decided to evaluate the Telecaster, which ran on a PowerPC Mac of some variety, probably had a whopping 100 megs of RAM, amazing it worked at all.We found it worked fairly well, however Premiere at the time was fairly clunky, and there was no time code based batch capture, so we passed.

The next year we purchased the debut edition of in:sync SpeedRazor, running off a Targa 2000 Pro PCI card, and our very first Pentium 1 133mhz machine, along with a 9gig SCSI RAID. Even with the RAID the data rate was too much for the computer to handle, and we could only play back our edited timelines in 10 minute increments before dropped frames. Thus, this system became our multimedia authoring station, knocking out the very best Cinepak Quicktimes money could buy.

We continued doing most of our editing on the 1" systems until they started to melt. In 1999 we acquired a Media 100 XR, and in 2000 and 2001 purchased 2 refurbished Media 100 LE systems from B+H. The Media 100 was a perfect replacement for the online bays, and the pre-8.0 software is basically an A-B roll edit system. The LE systems came with Premiere 5.0 for the Mac, which was slightly less clunky, very 6.5-like in fact. An upgrade to one system added the familiar Media 100i software.

By 2004 however, the Media 100i version 8.0 software upgrade required OS X. However our G3 400 machine would never handle such an upgrade, so at that point we decided to stop upgrading Media 100. 

Around this time we bought two Premiere 6.5 PC systems for the sole purpose of digitizing our vast library for eventual online streaming. http://www.cine-med.net 

It turned out, these computers were very useful 

It was at this point that I "borrowed" a little used Pentium 4 system (used as a kiosk twice a year) and installed Premiere 6.5 and Pro 1.5 in order to start knocking out projects requiring more than 2 video tracks and 4 audio tracks. I was hooked.

In 2005 we rebuilt this system with better components and adopted a reasonably priced modular storage solution, for easy sharing of projects and archiving of everything.

Finally in late 2007 I got a core 2 Duo system with CS 3.

So now you know the history. Tune in next time for the actual Tips and Tricks.

Thanks for reading.

Mike 

Remember your Mentors. I had a few great ones during college, and I believe everyone starting out should have one.

Prior to going to college, that is high school, I was not really interested in learning, or reading, aside from the required readings.

However a few key instructors in college, even before actual production classes, activated some dormant gene in my brain. Thus a love of reading and learning was born.

Prof. Markham - I could be mistaken about his name, it was 17 years ago, but my first semester Freshman year history professor was hated by most of his students. Why? Because, apparently, he did not follow the text and suggested such outlandish ideas as going to the library and reading about topics he mentioned in class. I did what the man said, and not only did I ace his class, I figured out how to learn, which is something my high school teachers never covered.

Prof. Schofield - Sophomore year we were required to take a lit 101 class. I was assigned her class, and what a happy coincidence. Something about the way she helped us get to the heart of a novel's themes cannot really be explained. Again, the semester's experience taught me how to read, and how to write finely crafted literature analysis. I'm not saying I could do it today, but at the time it was magical. I even won a writing award for one of my papers. So enthused was the class, that most of us took her class the next semester, concentrating on war literature, and womens' war experiences. I tracked Prof. Schofield down using Google a few years ago just to express my gratitude.

Once getting into production classes, I encountered Jim Keener, the long time television instructor at U of Hartford. Jim's method of teaching was...read the book, take the tests, and then ask questions. Sounds simple enough, but it works. Over the next 3 years I developed a great rapport with Jim, helping to teach a Summer class, working as a paid admin assistant in the TV studio, and using his laser printer to print cover letters before graduation. What I learned most from Jim was not so much production skills, but rather the aesthetics of media and the critical thinking approach to problem solving required for having a job after graduation. I was lucky enough to have Jim and his wife Martha attend my wedding a few years later.

The other staff member in the tv studio was Mike Martin, the tv studio technician. From Mike I learned the technical skills not covered in any of the classes, such as using a waveform and vectorscope, basic video and audio cable making, VTR maintenance and troubleshooting of all kinds. Mike took me to the 1993 AVID roadshow, the first time I saw a nonlinear editor, and also to a demo of SGI computers, which I would use soon after in my job at Cine-Med.

The result of all of these experiences were instrumental in my acclimation to my new job upon graduation. Timing decks and even opening up the back panel of an Ampex 1" machine to replace capacitors as well as dismantling VTR head motor brush assemblies and changing video heads were less daunting thanks to my college mentors.

Thanks for everything.

Mike Cohen 

Having run out of present day things to talk about, allow me to get back into the groove or recalling past experiences.

Summer 1994

We got a project doing a promotional video for a local hospital. The on-camera hosts were Skitch Henderson, former leader of the Tonight Show band, and his wife Ruth. Day one included the on-camera intro, using the trusty TRS-80 powered teleprompter. Being entertainers, they nailed the intros, and we were off to shoot other b-roll around the hospital. At one point we needed a "patient" in bed, so I began my tradition of appearing in videos. I donned my hospital gown and acted like a sick patient, whatever that means.

Later that year we were editing a video about the pulmonary system, and we needed video of a singer. So I put my baseball hat on backwards, threw a blue gel behind me in the audio booth, and pretended to sing. Not one of my best performances. And no, this clip will not be appearing on YouTube!

Another interesting project was a series of videos about the immune system. When you hear how T cells and natural killer cells work to identify and kill enemy combatants (viruses) it sounds like a perfectly orchestrated war. Perhaps we should have a molecular biologist in charge of the Pentagon!

The analogy which was cooked up compared the immune system to the ocean. Ocean of Symmetry: The Delicate Balance Trilogy. Sounds exciting, I know, but put your credit card away for a few minutes.

We had a plan to use our primary subject matter expert, a immunologist from New Jersey act as our on-camera presenter. We went to Sandy Hook, New Jersey to the beach where they used to test bombs. We set up our trusty Jimmy Jib, and planned to shoot some dramatic intro and bridge segments with the doctor. Only problem was, it was an extremely windy day, so any sound we recorded would be inaudible. Thus, we shot a few crane shots of the crashing waves and called it a day.

Our next segment was a roundtable discussion with our host and two others. We set this up in a conference room and did our best to shoot this with two cameras and two mics.

A couple of months later, we finally re-shot the on-camera host on a beach in CT. We hired an actor. Again, it was a windy day. This time we had him do his lines both in close up and wide shots. He used a microcassette recorder and an earpiece so he did not have to memorize his lines. Then we re-recorded his lines in the relative quiet of a car. He basically did on-location ADR, and the end result matches up nicely.

1995

This was the year everything started to make sense. As I described in previous posts, Cine-Med was nice enough to hire me out of college. My first job was duping tapes, shipping and receiving, really the most important job we have, which is filling orders and keeping customers happy. Within a few months I was promoted to editor and started learning to shoot surgeries.

I started shooting on my own in early 1995, both surgeries and other types of videos, and really learned how to think on my feet, something they don't teach you in college.

My first trips were with a production assistant, and included New York, St. Louis and Boston. My first solo trip was to St. Louis, and it was uneventful. I will not go into detail on this particular surgery, let's just say it is not dinner table conversation.

In fact my next shoot was in a similar area of the body, and was to this day the most disgusting thing I have seen. Well, maybe the second most disgusting, you'll have to wait until 2000 to hear about that one!

In 1995 I bacame the main guy to edit surgeries. Step one was obviously the video shoot. At this time our two cameras were a Ikegami HL-95 docked to a MII recorder and a HL-55 (2/3" chips!) with a portable BetaSP deck.

Now seems like a good place to talk about air travel. We had, and still have, camera cases from Porta Brace, which hold the camera, power supply, some batteries and accessories. Fully loaded this can be a 20-30 pound load. We used to carry this whole case on the plane and stick it in the overhead compartment, without so much as a batted eyelid from anyone. I usually had a pair of vicegrips, and a Leatherman in the case as well. In fact the only time the security folks questioned the contents of my case was when my set of mini screwdrivers was missing one screwdriver.

Anyway, how times change.

The goal was to shoot skin to skin, that is from incision to skin closure, but not record the whole procedure. Tapes were 20 or 30 minute loads, at a unit cost of around $35 each, so we did not want to burn too many tapes just to edit out much of the material. So We tried to use one 20 minute tape per 1 hour of surgery. This involved telling the surgeon when I was stopping and starting the camera, and of course the occasional missed shot. Who hasn't hit the record button to start the tape, only realizing later the tape was already running and you actually stopped the tape?

Upon my returnit was time for the first edit. I would start a new EDL in the ACE 25 edit controller, load my first tape, throw the deck into remote, and start logging the shots.

Thanks to Google Image search, and the people whose pictures these are, here are some links to get you in the mood:

http://www.videopark.com/images/oldbroadcast/ace25.jpg

link

http://www.chalkhillmedia.org/Museum/images/AmpexVPR80.JPG

http://www.videointerchange.com/images/AU-60MII.jpg

http://hpbimg.marcelstvmuseum.com/ikegami%20hl-95%20totaal03.jpg

My method was to add 30 seconds of black, 30 seconds of bars, 30 seconds of black, then leave 7 seconds for title page 1, 7 seconds for page 2 and 4 seconds for the company logo. Next I hit play, and then on the fly hit MARK IN, wait for a good place to cut, hit MARK OUT, then hit NEXT which would create an entry in the new EDL. Having backtimed my first segment of Black so the program starts at 1:00:00:00, with each new edit added to the EDL, the record time would build automatically. By the time I reached my last tape, the goal was to have a total record time of less than one hour.

Next step is to black some 1" tape, although this could be done while building my EDL. For those of you under the age of 30, we used to use 1" machines, similar to the old reel to reel 1/2 track audio recorders you may have seen in old Led Zeppelin videos. You load the tape from the source reel to the takeup reel. 1" tape came in 2 hour reels from Ampex, Sony or another manufacturer whose name escapes me.

Once your tape is blacked, you let the edit controller work its magic. You cue up the 1" tape to the beginning of timecode (although you could just let the edit controller do this, the braking mechanism during rewind would occasionally malfunction, which could ruin your tape) , then load your first tape, and execute the EDL. You then just need to babysit the edit to make sure all the edits happen.

The edit controller talks to the video switcher, so Black, Bars and the videotape decks are automatically routed to the record deck. Then you check your edits, add your titles using an insert edit, and make your VHS time-code dub for the client.

Subsequent edits consist of following the client's time code editing notes, such as "delete from 1:23:45 to 1:23:54" and so on, and sometimes "move 1:20:06-1:20:32 to 1:15:18 then freeze on last frame for 10 seconds and label superior epigastric artery" or someting like that.

In most cases I would make the edit revisions on the original EDL, remembering to first save a copy as Edit1a. The "a" means it is a revision of Edit 1, but not rippled to become Edit 2. You recall an edit to the work area, alter your in or out points on the source, then hit NEXT to send the edit back to the EDL. Then you ripple that edit to make the record timecode continuous, taking into account the trims you made to the source durations. This was the most difficult concept to teach new hires, because let's face it, adding and subtracting timecodes, even with a computer, was not something you could relate to. Kind of like high school calculus (sorry Mrs. Zangari, you tried your best!).

Once your edit revisions are made in the EDL, you have 2 options. Option 1 is to pickup the new edit where the 1st edit left off, and assemble the edit using insert edits (you could use assemble edits for either the first of 2nd edits, but timecode breaks can be a headache). Or option 2 is to black a new tape and make a new edit 2 master. I should mention we often re-used 1" reels from the previous year's 1st, 2nd and 3rd edits, so we always have a pile of reels ranging from 15 to 60 minutes, cut to length. Again, for those of you born after the Empire Strikes Back was released, once an edit on 1" tape was complete, we would cut the tape with scissors so we could use the rest of the reel for another project.

This process of editing revisions continued until the client was happy with the final edit. For the final edit, narration is added and then the final video is layed over the narration video (that is a whole 'nother discussion), and then a decision whether or not to do an A/B roll has to be made. I happen to think that surgery video s look best with dissolves on most edits. However to do dissolves in a linear edit suite is a half day to full day project. First you need to load every edit in the EDL and change from a cut to a dissolve, but making every other edit a new reel number, and doing a dissolve effect in the EDL. Once you had the dissolve set and you hit NEXT, you then need to delete the previous cut incarnation of the 2nd edit, and then using the auto-generated match frame, continue on to the next edit.

Having made dissolves on all the edits, you print out the EDL on the attached dot matrix form feed printer. Have I mentioned what I'd like to do to the guy who invented form feed printers? No? Ok, use your imagination. Reloading the printer paper was a headache, because the printer was in the rack with the edit controller CPU, and there was not much room to work, not to mention lots and lots of cables everywhere.

So you take your printout and a highlighter, and you highlight all the edits which are on reel B. Then you setup a machine to machine editing system, where the record machine (MII deck) has a built-in edit controller, and connect this via 9-pin serial cable to the source machine (either MII or BetaSP). You also attach a BNC cable for video, a BNC for timecode and audio if needed. You need to run the same timecode because the EDL assumes you will have the same timecode on your B-Roll as on your A-Roll for each edit, unless you are dissolving from Tape 1 to Tape 2, which only happens once if at all.

By comparison, the early AVID systems were not broadcast quality, so you did your edit, then output an EDL, and your B-Roll list. Thus, you could assemble your B-Roll tape using continuous time code, simply following the source times provided by the AVID. The EDL would keep track of everything for you. Now back to the old way... 

First you black the beginning of your B-roll tape. Then you setup your first edit as an assemble edit with external timecode (is this free-run or rec-run? anyone? Bueller?) Thus, for each edit, the timecode on your b-roll changes to match the timecode on the source tape. You need to add pre-roll and post-roll to each copied piece of video, usually 7 seconds, to accommodate the pre-roll and post-roll of the edit controller, not to mention the pre-roll of the record deck. The pre-roll of the 1" machine could be a little finicky.

With your B-roll made, you should be able to execute the EDL automatically. Hypothetically. In a perfect world. Should with a capital S. Occasionally, sometimes.

Obviously problems arise anytime you are making machines do the work of people, but over time you learn to anticipate problems based upon past experiences.

Fast forward to 1999 when I got our first Media 100 XR version 5. When I learned how to do a full A/B dissolved edit on a whole program in approximately 5 keystrokes, I think my heart grew five sizes that day.

Well, that does it for today. In my next post I will continue with 1995, relating some more travel adventures and the result of spending my evenings on AOL (not yet the internet).

Thanks for reading.

Mike Cohen

For about 2 months I kept putting off the project I completed today. As with most things for which one procrastinates, the actual work turns out to be not so bad.

This project should be a straight forward edit. Client reviewed the TC VHS dubs, wrote accurate times, and sent me the tapes. Only problem is, I did not shoot the video. Nor did I make the time code dubs.

1. The person who made the TC dubs read time-code off the VHS tape - or they set a tape counter and let it run as a superimposed time-code-like readout. If that person were to do the edit, presumably he or she would use the original raw footage VHS (don't ask) and line up the counter with the dubs. Perhaps that person is still using a machine to machine edit bay. Arghhh!

2. Because here in Connecticut we use these newfangled computers to do our editing, the VHS method ain't gonna happen.

3. Step one was to copy all of the raw VHS tapes to mini-DV tapes. (VHS was recorded in an operating room, one of the few remaining hospitals that uses VHS - no names mentioned of course!)

4. I copied several 2-hour VHS tapes to 6 83-minute mini-DV tapes.

5. Now I have actual timecode, so all that is left to do is sync it up with the VHS TC dubs.

6. Actually, having gotten this far, I took a 2 month break to work on other things!

7. Beginning with the first TC VHS dub, I found the first edit point provided by the client. Then I tried to find the same point on the 1st DV tape. Easier said than done, as surgery is not conducive to scanning visually at high speed.

8. So I first need to find a sync point on both tapes. On the VHS TC dub I find something which is easily identifiable, the view of the laparoscope entering the abdomen. Because the scope goes through a blue plastic cannula, the blue concentric circles is a striking enough image. I pause the VHS.

9. Find the same spot, give or take a few frames, on the first DV tape.

10. Write down the following equation:

VHS IN-1 00:01:24:22

DV IN-1 00:02:07:20

Offset = +42:28

In college we were actually tested on such time-code calculations.

However, in college we did not have Google. 

Today, we have Google, which was nice enough to direct me to a free downloadable time-code calculator.

11. Given the offset, I find the first edit point on the VHS tape, pause the tape, do the calculation to find the corresponding value on the DV tape, cue up the DV tape a few seconds before the edit point, eyeball the two screens to make sure it is the same shot, play the VHS and capture the DV clip into Premiere. I watch the VHS as it plays, so I can eyeball when to stop capturing the DV tape.

12. If the next edit point on the VHS and DV tapes is less than say 1 minute away, I just let both tapes continue playing, nearly in sync, and eyeball the next edit point and capture on the fly.

13. If the next edit point is more than 1 minute away, I find the next edit point on one of the tapes, do the math, find the point on the other tape, stir and repeat.

14. This goes on until the end of the DV tape is reached.

Here are some visuals of my edit setup to help you...visualize things.

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=846895171&context=photostream&size=...

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=846895203&context=photostream&size=...

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=846895153&context=photostream&size=...


15. However, the TC VHS dubs were not continuous dubs of the raw VHS tapes. 

Every so often the offset was offset and a new offset needed to be calculated. 

16. Having spent most of the day capturing all the shots from all the tapes, it was time to make the edit.

With the cursor at the start of the timeline, I select the first clip in the bin, hit "2" which is my keyboard shortcut for insert, and in about 5 minutes have the whole program edited.

Took another half hour or so to trim the edits, as I intentionally took some extra video on each clip to account for dissolves and inevitable needs to extend shots once the narration materializes.

Then added some titles to designate the different sections, used the handy combination of "page-dn" and "ctrl+D" to add dissolves on every edit.

Final task is to export each segment as an AVI, deinterlaced, no audio, with a new timecode overlay matching the timecode of the sequence. Final product will be FLV files to upload to our customized video review website.

An alternate approach to this madness is to capture the DV tapes and VHS dubs in their entirety and sync everything up as different video tracks on the timeline, but this would actually take twice as long. I have done it this way also, and it takes twice as long. Plus when the sync goes off you are delayed further.

Another way would be to have captured the VHS raw and the TC VHS in their entirety, and sync them up likewise. However I like things with timecode, should you every need to go back to the source, or heavens forbid you lose your media drive, but were smart enough to backup the project files to another drive. Can't batch capture off VHS. Now if I only had my ACE 25...

Thanks for reading.

Mike

PS - Now seems like a good time to plug my brother's blog - totally unrelated, but very interesting.

http://jpctravels.blogspot.com/

I am sitting on a plane, heading to Florida for a much needed vacation. My parents are excited to show me their canasta skills!

This got me thinking about my travel experiences related to video production of course. Let me begin by saying that as many hundreds of airplanes I have been on, it still amazes me that you can strap yourself into a metal tube with wing-shaped gas tanks, and travel at 300-500mph, then land and come to a stop without an explosion. It is a miracle. Now on with the show...

Upon taking my job duping tapes, my other job duty was as a production assistant on the road, with the intent of learning the skills for my future job duties as a videographer.

In 1994 the primary type of video we made was the surgical teaching video, a 15 to 20 minute narrated surgical procedure.

My first shoot was to Providence, RI to help record a narration for a nearly complete video on breast cancer surgery. I met our head guy Jim at his apartment in Middletown, and rode with him to Providence. We were shooting an on-camera intro and narration. Upon our arrival in his very cramped office my job was to setup the camera (HL55) and deck (BVW-100? Portable BetaSP deck) along with the teleprompter. Our teleprompter was (and still is used once a year) a black and white CRT monster, in an equally monstrous metal case. The concept is simple; the camera mounts to a cast iron plate, which holds the monitor. A piece of glass is placed at an angle so as to reflect he text from the monitor while the camera lens shoots through the glass. I know most video folks understand how this works, but your average TV viewer may not. Those two glass things in front of the President during the State of the Union speech are not bulletproof shields, but Teleprompters.

Anyway, since this was 1994, we had a very high-tech Tandy laptop to feed the prompter with text. This "Fischer Price computer" ran on DOS and had some convoluted controls to output video from a serial port to a BNC cable. Editing text was tedious, but hey, it worked. These days if I need the prompter, which is rare, I just use my current laptop with Word, making the font size really big.

The shoot went fine, and Jim was impressed that I knew where to plug all the cables. Obviously he had not read my previous blog posts! 

The next shoot was to Chapel Hill to UNC Medical Center for a similar shoot – on-camera narration for a video which I would soon become intimately familiar with. About a month later, Jim suddenly decided to leave the company for a major sports broadcasting network, leaving a sweet job opening in his wake. My boss knew I had done some editing, so he gave me the chance to show my stuff. Jim had left the 1^st edit of a very complicated video, which I was to revise and finish. The main elements of the video were the on-camera and narration segments we recorded earlier in this paragraph, some complex 2D and 3D animation, a lot of text builds and stock footage. 

Luckily my college experience with EDLs came in handy, as in this pre-digital era, the EDL was the only way to interpret someone else's work. Each EDL line had room for about 256 characters of comments, maybe less. Jim had made notes regarding stock footage tapes or ADO or CG settings, and I suspect there were some notes on the printed script. 

So I first had to figure out the editing system itself. Having used the Paltex, Grass Valley and Sony 9000 edit controllers, figuring out the ACE 25 was not difficult. The Ampex Vista switcher was another story. While the master and M/E buses were standard, all of the controls for wipes, dissolves and compositing effects and keyers were contained in an LCD menu system. The ADO was another unique device. Very powerful actually, but it took some getting used to the quirks. Finally the ALEX character generator was a very powerful CG unit, although the saved pages loaded slowly, and the GPI trigger sometimes did not work. 

The machine room had 2 VPR-80 1" machines, 3 MII decks, a Betacam deck, and SVHS deck and your usual scopes and terminal equipment, and a bird's nest of wires.

I just realized I have digressed from travel. Oh well, this was a key moment which must be recalled in continuity. 

I did have help from the #2 editor, although he did not know much and he too departed.

So there I was working 10-12 hours a day, gradually getting through the video. The main problem was in rebuilding a video on tape, you need to accurately do insert edits of the revisions. If you want to open up 10 seconds mid video, you need to make a sub-master. 

Also I wanted to maintain the smooth flow of the video, which meant a lot of match frame edits and dissolves. This was easier said than done. The ACE 25 had a function where before performing an edit you tell the machine which field you want the edit to happen on. Failure to do this results in a head switch error, which upon playback means that the entire picture shifts to the left or right slightly, making a match frame edit a disaster.

Another skill I needed to refine was the timing of decks. Normally the decks were timed, however given the heat generated in the machine room and other factors such as loose sync cables and little men who lived in the racks and obviously messed with things overnight, deck timing was a daily event. For the modern day digital editor, this may be a lesson for you. 

Assume you have a Betacam deck on switcher input VTR1, and color bars on the BARS input. We assume that the BARS come from the sync generator, so the synchronization of the BARS matches house sync. Upon playback of a Beta tape, you notice that the colors seem off. This can either be due to a TBC setting or the subcarrier phase adjustment. So you dissolve on the switcher between the two inputs, and if there is a color shift mid-edit, then it is the subcarrier phase. If there is no color shift mid-edit, but rather a visual abnormality with the color based upon your eyeball, then you need to adjust the TBC.

If it is the subcarrier, you need to set the switcher to alternate between the two inputs with a 1 second interval. This is so you can look at the vectorscope, and see where the subcarrier differs between the two input. Again, assuming the BARS are correct, you stick a tweaker (small screwdriver) into the subcarrier adjustment pot on the Beta deck's TBC, and rotate it until the vectorscope shows no differential between the two input signals. Luckily the subcarrier pot is usually incremental, so there are only about 8 different positions, making it relatively east to get a lock.

If the problem is the TBC color phase, not the subcarrier phase, you play your Beta tape. Hopefully you recorded 30 seconds to 1 minute of bars on your tape. Playing the bars, you adjust the TBC hue control until the color vectors hit their marks on the vectorscope.

However if the camera was not properly white balanced, the color bars mean squat, so in this case you eyeball it.

The other phase to worry about, and actually a more common problem, is horizontal or H phase. Incidentally the symbol for phase is a circle with a line through it, although I do not recall the exact configuration. So H phase was apparent if on an effect like a dissolve, the two sources shift horizontally one way or the other. This is pretty apparent. The means of adjusting the H phase is a bit more complex, although similar to the subcarrier.

First you punch up the house sync, such as blackburst, on the switcher. You adjust the waveform monitor to show just the sync signal. If memory serves, you turn the zoom knob until the sync interval is magnified to the full 1 volt display, and the details of this are a bit murky. Then you run your switcher effect to cycle between your house sync and your deck, and then adjust the H phase pot until the scope locks into position. The H phase has unlimited positions, so you need to watch the scope carefully.

Once the sync signals are set, you can also check the other TBC levels. Saturation is adjusted using the vectorscope, getting the amplitude of the chroma into the little boxes. The luma and setup are for your video levels. The white should never exceed 100 IRE, and the black or setup level should be set to 7.5 IRE in NTSC. Again, if the actual recorded camera image is lacking chroma, luma or is the wrong hue regardless of color bar setup, then eyeball it, but stay within legal levels.

So based upon getting to work at 8:30am, it is now lunch time and we have not yet edited anything. Oh and when you put in another tape, you may need to repeat some or all of the above.

2D and 3D animation was a new concept for me. This being the pre-digital, non-DDR days, animation was recorded via VLAN to a deck. Specifically, animation sequences were modeled, rendered and composited in the Alias suite from SGI, the precursor to Maya, running on an Indigo workstation. I will have to look up the equivalent processing power, but the RISC processor running UNIX was probably like a Pentium 2, at a cost in 1994 dollars of about $30,000. Once the frames were rendered, the VLAN software and hardware sent each frame of animation along with RS-422 deck control signals to a MII recording deck. For each frame, a 1 frame insert edit was performed. This meant that for each frame of say a 10 second animation, the deck took about 15 seconds to record the frame. So a 10 second animation took 10x30x12= 75 minutes. You cannot be in a hurry. We tried to lay off the animations over night, but god forbid the power goes out or the little men living in the racks get bored.

So assuming you have all your animation on tape, that becomes one piece of the puzzle, along with CG, stock footage and narration and on-camera segments. In most cases it should have been straight forward insert edits, but since this was re-doing someone else's work, mind you someone who had used this edit system for 5 years or so, it was laborious. The worst parts were when I would get to an animation, look at the source animation, and see it was different than what was on the master tape. Jim had cleverly used the ADO and series of stills and ADO layering effects to composite more elements in animations than existed in the source elements. It would have been easier to re-composite the animations in Alias and re-render the frames, but would probably take much longer given the time to lay the frames back to tape. So I had to figure out the compositing in the ADO. Basically the ADO had two channels, front and back. Either channel could have different video, routed via the ADO router within the Vista switcher. And each channel could be frozen, and a luma key generated in the switcher could be re-composited within the ADO, so you could grab a still frame of the composite image in one channel, display that channel in the switcher, then use the open channel to add a new composite layer and re-grab that and so on. So you could have a complex composite of stills. I believe the ADO also saved transparency, today known as alpha channel, then known as luck. Each still frame was often the end of a new ADO animation. These days you would do it with multiple video tracks in Premiere or After Effects. This was the old school way.

After about a month of this, the video went out for final review, and then I had to do a final round of edits to complete the video. Having proven my ability to work under pressure, I was assigned editing projects with much less complexity, namely surgery videos. Using my EDL knowledge, ability to add and subtract timecode in my head, and an intimate knowledge of the editing system, life was good.

Well, the captain just informed us of our initial descent into Fort Lauderdale, so I must sign off for now. In my next post I will continue the travel adventures, perhaps relating the associated editing experiences in continuity. I am an editor after all, so continuity is important.

Thanks for reading. Oh my inner ears…

Mike

I am spending this week with my parents in Florida. As a good semi-retired couple they dutifully purchased a 60" Sony rear projection LCD tv upon moving into their new home. Perhaps the problem is Comcast digital cable, but here are my observations:

1. There are not many HD channels.

2. On the HD channels, not all of the content is HD.

3. Some commercials are in HD and look awesome. Local commercials and most national spots are non-HD with crappy sound. This is not a criticism of commercial producers, but merely an indication that HD has not fully taken hold even on the networks.

4. Live HD shows probably look awesome over the air, but digital cable adds so much compression that it can be unwatchable. Might as well watch the SD version. For example on July 4 we watched the Macy's fireworks show on NBC. NBC had artists perform on top of Rockefeller center, which was nicely done, good lighting, jib, helicopter shots, the whole shebang. But the compression killed it for me. I try to point this out to my dad and others, and most people do not notice. Is the problem with Comcast or is it the problem of multiple up and down linked satellite feeds?

5. Non-live broadcasts are better, but still lots of compression artifacts in areas of motion.

6. Broadcasts of questionable format. We watched the Concert for Diana 1-hour NBC boil down, which was recorded on the DVR. It was letterboxed 4x3, just like on the SD VH1 live broadcast. However the NBC logo was indented from the left, indicating it was an HD signal at some point, protected for 4x3. Comcast gives no indication of what type of signal you are watching. One would think that an HD signal would not be 4x3 letterboxed. It looked pretty good, but not crystal clear.

7. A side note, we watched the CBS Boston Pops special at 10:00 eastern time. Normally I have watched this on A&E, and sat through the hour of bad one-hit wonder pop singers, followed closely by the 1812 overture, Stars and Stripes forever and fireworks, usually with Kris Kristoferson or some horrible on-camera host. Well this year (2007) CBS started their broadcast 7/8 of the way through the 1812 overture, then put Craig Kilborn of the Late Late Show center stage wearing a bright yellow Boston Police rain jacket. He attempted to make some July 4th humour. Poor attempt. Then came the part of the broadcast for which, hopefully, some CBS executive will lose his job over. John Mellencamp, fresh from the plastic surgery clinic, performed one of his patriotic songs. Apparently the sound mix for the Boston Pops and Craig Kilborn's microphone were routed directly into the satellite truck. The sound mix for Mellencamp and his band was non-existant. I think there was an on-camera mic somewhere which picked up some of his voice. The guitars were silent, and the Boston Pops drowned out any other sound. Then came the Patriotic sing-along, featuring the Boston Children's Choir. Again, there was no apparent attempt to mic these kids, or the audience for that matter, so all we heard were the Pops. Don't get me wrong, the Pops are great. Then more Kilborn banter and R-O-C-K in the USA, wth a similar poor sound mix. Towards the end of the song, Keith Lockhart and Kilborn chimed in for the chorus, and their mics were at full volume, further drowning out anyone else. Finally Star and Stripes forever, normally immediately following the 1812, was the finale. Oh wait, let's get Craig Kilborn on the air one more time to introduce the fireworks display, featuring poorly mixed canned music. Shame on you CBS.

So after about a minute of fireworks featuring more compression artifacts than I could bear, I switched to the HD movie channels, which all seemed to be running a You, Me and Dupree marathon. So I wound up on the regular Showtime for Superman Returns in SD. I stretched it to fill the screen, and watched/slept through the whole movie. Unfortunately a good sound system and a big tv could not save this movie.

If any readers work for CBS, Comcast or Bryan Singer productions, forgive my ranting.

Thanks for reading,

Mike

If you have already read my first post on internships, thanks for coming back.

At the conclusion of Fall semester of Junior year of college, with two news internships under my belt, it was time to take a semester and get our student tv network off the ground, and on the air. I actually used that cheesy line in a story!

Anyway, during Fall 1992 we worked each week to create a few news packages, learn something about video journalism, and practice the really challenging part, pulling together a 30 minute live newscast. Our campus had recently installed a cable system, free to all on-campus residents (I guess it was not so much free as included with the room and board.)

The campus TV studio, built in 1992, purchased a modulator for cable channel 2. Hence, we became Channel 2 News on the Student Television Network (STN).

My job during the week was to shoot and edit a package, and on live show day I was the technical director during the show.

Remember we were figuring this out as we went along. The few of us who had done news or sports internships set the rules, and tried to teach our classmates what we had learned. I say classmates, but this was an extracurricular club. We had received an inital $17,000 from the student activities council which paid for a 2-CCD Panasonic SVHS camcorder, an SVHS editing deck, microphones, tripods and blank tapes. Luckily the tv studio was fully equipped with U-Matic decks and all the bells and whistles needed for the live broadcast. So we shot on SVHS, but cut our stories on U-Matic.

The first live broadcast was in January or February 1993. I had the lead story, something about Clinton allowing Gays in the Military. I interviewed a history professor who was in the Navy in WWII and an openly gay humanities professor about their opinions. I used some stock footage from CNN and did the obligatory stand-up intro and outro. The famous line "what the President says......goes" became my catch phrase for the rest of college.

Our weather segment often included a celebrity weather person. This first show had Beasley Reece, the former sports anchor from WVIT in hartford and former New York Giant. Because of the difficulty of getting people comfortable with Chroma Key, we did the weather segment on tape. When we recorded Beasley before the broadcast, we did 2 takes, because the 1st take had a technical error. Unfortunately during the live broadcast, the tape was cued to the 1st take, so we had to quickly cut to commercial then try again. Then we edited the show for future broadcasts. We had one half hour show per week, so we re-ran the broadcast a lot!

Ah, live tv!

Over the coming weeks we perfected our craft, and I did some very interesting stories. One idea I had was to do a story about the blood drive, while having blood drawn myself. Much to my dismay, just the sight of blood being drawn on others was enough to make me queasy. Little did I know that a year later I would be videotaping surgery for a living. More on this later!

What's all this got to do with internships anyway?

School got out, I moved into on-campus apartment housing, and began my Summer 1993 excitement.

I was staying on campus for the Summer, so I worked several jobs plus my 3 day per week intership at Cox Cable Advertising, then known as Dimension Media Services. I should call your attention to the fact that this facility was about a mile away from my future wife's house, although we had not met yet. Perhaps one day my subconscious memory of seeing her at the grocery store buying some cold cuts will come back to me, but nothing yet!

Responsibilities included updating the weekly tapes for the head end. This was a pre-striped 60 minute U-Matic with tones before each 30 second spot. I and the other intern had to replace old spots with new ones at the appropriate spot using an insert edit. This was before commercials were run off a server. Every Friday one of us would drive to the Head End in Meriden and deliver the new tapes and take back the previous set to be updated the next week.

The rest of our time was spent going on shoots for the free 30 second commercial local advertisers get with their advertising contract, and helping to edit some spots. One interesting weekly spot was the IGA donut. The intro and tag were the same, but there was space in the middle for video of that week's special, such as milk, eggs or steaks. We would go down to the IGA supermarket, pick up a sample of the special product, then shoot video of it. Pretty exciting stuff!

I have to say this internship was not that exciting.

One piece of potential excitement came with the arrival of the Matrox Hybrid editor. It was essentially a pc controlled editing system. Think of it as an early Tricaster, only one which controlled the decks. It didn't work very well.

I mentioned living on campus, since this internship was in Cheshire, CT and I was from Massachusetts. I worked part time as a TV studio assistant, helping to organize the tape library using MS Access, giving tours to potential students and their families, and I got to be a teaching assistant for one class during the Summer term. And I got paid!

Another on-campus job that Summer was working as an usher for the on-campus theater. This was easy work, and I got to stand right in front of the stage for such acts as Suzanne Vega, Phish, Squeeze and Wynton Marsalis. I guess this would be a good spot to say I was a volunteer usher at the Tweeter Center in Massachusetts the previous year, and saw some concerts including Huey Lewis and the News, Paul McCartney and Yes. Hey, it was the early 90's!

Yet another on-campus job was an AV tech for an auditorium in the Communications building. This was easy but occasionally a nightmare. Main problem was messed up wiring in the booth.

Once the Fall 1993 semester began, Senior Year, I had a full plate.

Main Dish - Channel 2 News, General Manager, News Director. We now had a full crew of talent and technical people and new recruits. I and the producers came up with the rundown, assigned the stories, did stories of our own, assisted others with editing and got ready for Friday's live show. Now granted a half hour show is usually produced in a half day, but we all had classes, internships, relationships, job searches, sports and paying jobs, so it was a challenge to make it all come together.

A few technical notes. Our switcher was a simple 1 bus, 16 input analog switcher, with 1 linear keyer and one downstream keyer for supers. My technical mentor Mike told me "if you can run a switcher, you can do pretty much anything." He was right. Setting up a downstream and linear key in the preview bus, taking the effect simultaneous with changing camera inputs, then losing first the super then the OTS graphic in a smooth operation is enough to rewire anyone's brain for logical thought and fast thinking.

Our paintbox was an old school unit with a tablet. The video input was black and white, which was ok for text, but not so good if you wanted to create an over the shoulder graphic with a color picture in it. Never fear, I was there. Using a combination of video stills pulled either off the deck with dynamic motion heads or from the frame synch, I captured the still into the Abekas still store. This resulted in a full frame image. To make it more stylized, I would superimpose the output of the paintbox as a linear key over the still store and paint a black mask over the areas I want to key out. Then I would route this live composite to the 2nd channel of the still store and grab that image. Then I would put that image in the primary still store channel, and key color graphics and Chyron over the first composite to create a 2nd composite and grab that into the 2nd still store channel as the final graphic. During the show I would load the graphic, route it to the DVE, position it over the shoulder in the preview monitor, then key out the black using the linear keyer to get a non-square superimposed color OTS graphic. Today you just use Photoshop, but in 1993 that was science fiction!

The paintbox and Chyron were working great until each one decided to short circuit on different occasions. The paintbox we replaced with a PC based system which ws sweet and did all the color compositing we wanted. The Chyron had to be sent out for repairs, which was actually before the original paintbox died. So using the black and white copy stand camera, we captured our supers the old school way from cards printed in large font on a laser printer. Each one was captured to the still store, then using the linear keyer and the matte generator we had decent temporary supers.

I could go on, but that will suffice.

Side Dish 1 - Serial Drama Production. Many moons ago a serial drama production class (aka, MOW) was proposed. A former student wrote a script and it was tucked away in the theater chair's desk for future use. This semester there was enough interest in this class, from all the same Seniors who were busy with the newscast by the way, so we went for it. First we all volunteered for positions. I chose lighting director because that was an area I needed practice with. The only person who wanted to be director was the only person who had time for that role. The guy who shall remain nameless was our newscast producer, a relatively poor student who did not actually graduate, and was sort of an idiot. Like the drug addict mentioned in an earlier post, I'm sure he is a responsible adult person these days, but at the time we all complained about him a lot. Luckily a director is only as good as his crew, and we were a good crew!

"Into the Night with Righteous Wright." A story about a on-campus radio host who solves crimes, or some idiodic idea, was our script. Each weekend during the semester, after we were all exhausted from the newscast and other activities, we devoted about 24 hours to shooting this movie around campus. First we held auditions. A few actors were from Hartford College for Women, our sister school, there were a few adults, and a few U of H students. A few crew membersincluding myself had background parts. Say what you will about college actors and our script, every setup was a learning experience, all going into the master database of stored experiences for future reference.

Perhaps in a future post, if I find a good bottle of Merlot, I will recount scene by scene the experience. For now just a few highlights will do.

The exterior establishing shots were shot on another campus which was more college-like than our 1950's campus. The Radio station scenes were shot both in the campus radio station, WSAM, and the audio booth of the tv station. The fraternity house exterior was the Dean's house. We shot this night for night, which was a mistake. All the lights in the universe could not make the whole house look good. By the way we were shooting with a Hitachi Z1 (ironic that the very popular Sony HDV camera of today is also the Z1).

The interior of the Fraternity house was the basement rec room of one of the on-campus dorms. In scouting this location someone forgot to consider how our wheelchair bound audio engineer would get to the basement location, so he had to miss that day.

The library scene was shot in corner of the library. Every minute or so there was a loud plumbing noise, so that 2 minute scene took hours to get right.

By the time we wrapped in December no one wanted to think about this project again, so the tapes went into a box and were stashed right next to the Ark of the Covenant never to be seen again.

One night just before graduation, I returned a camera to the studio around 11pm, and having no plans for the rest of the night, I opened the boxes of 20 minute U-Matic tapes, found the logs, and cut the show in one edit on the cuts only edit bay. At 7am I made some VHS dubs and went to bed. Come to think of it, I did not went to bed, but actually loaded my car with some unneeded stuff from my dorm and drove back to Massachusetts for the weekend. I do not recommend driving 150 miles on no sleep.

Last year I decided to tweak some edits of this show and put it on YouTube. Here is part one if anyone is interested. Remember this was made by a bunch of 21 year olds on a tube camera - could use some color correction!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyhDlsCyvhw

Dessert - Post-production editing Class

Before 1993, apparently, there was never enough interest to warrant more than 3 produciton classes. Our same group of overachievers plus some art students enrolled in the Post-Production class. This one was taught by the Art School's video instructor Gene. Those of us in the art school video program were accustomed to making video art pieces. Those of us in a broadcast video program were not. Again, it was a good learning experience.

Lessons included the use of an EDL. If using a cuts only system, we were told to submit an EDL before being allowed to do our edit. If using the online edit system, which I and one other guy knew how to use, the computer would generate an EDL up to 1000 lines, or less. It was a Paltex Abner. The primary feature of this edit controller seemed to be making head switches on the wrong field, making match frame editing a laborious process. It once took me 8 hours to cut a 15 second spot, just because I wanted to use dissolves. Anyone under 21 who is reading this had better go out and read Droidmakers which gives a great history of nonlinear editing. This unit was linear editing at its worst!

At the time we all thought making an EDL was an unneccessary skill to learn. However a year later when I started doing editing at my job, using the ACE 25, the value of an EDL became apparent. In performing 2nd and 3rd edits on cuts only surgery edits, I could in fact do the edit using only the EDL without looking at the video, then ripple the edit and let the machine perform the EDL in a hands-off manner. Sweet.

We had to learn how to place GPI triggers in the editing instructions. A GPI was a signal which let the edit controller trigger the cut or dissolve or take buttons of the switcher, so that at the initiation of the edit, the effect would go at the right moment. I could draw you a diagram if you need it!

We also had acquired a D/ESAM - digital edit suite audio mixer. This was a precursor to today's control surfaces for DAW software like Cakewalk or Protools. This little cash register sized unti actually was an audio mixer which would remeber your moves during preview, and then using GPI make the moves during the edit. This was good on paper!

Assignments included: Record a audio only poem or other production. Then we all were randomly given someone else's audio track to create visuals. Another assignment was to create 1 minute of raw video and turn it into a 3 minute finished piece using artistic/technical processes. My neighbor played the piano so I had him play some notes and speak some lines so I could cut them together.  The final project was whatever we wanted to do, as long as we used some post-produciton editing skills, such as dissolves, effects, audio mixing or color correction (TBC, nothing too fancy). I simulated a virtual reality fly through of my apartment building, with my roommate playing his guitar for the soundtrack.

I shall try to find some of my projects and post links.

Some extra-extra-curricular learning courtesy of the studio technician included timing decks, using a waveform and vectorscope, wiring up a portable live production rack, and general studio maintenance. He also took me on field trips to see a demo of SGI computers and the AVID Roadshow where the Media Composer was first demonstrated to the masses.

The Travelers TV studio experience discussed in an earlier post was during this time also. Apparently I found time to eat, sleep and pass my classes. I seem to remember some exhaustion setting in around October. Actually some photos of me from this time show that perhaps I was not doing much eating!

Late Night Snack - 3 days a week my Spring semester of Senior year - 1994 - I worked as an intern at Visual Concepts Media, one of the top corporate communicationsoutfits in all the land. Started by a tv reporter and news shooter, they did high end work for CT based companies such as United Technologies, Hueblein, Duracell and Pilot Pen.

I was told "if we find you invaluable, we'll hire you when you graduate," as they had done with their AVID editor two years earlier. It didn't pan out, but that is ok.

My first day on the job I got to use Armor All to clean bird droppings off of video and audio cables from a shoot done over the weekend in a factory. Hopefully it was not a food factory!

Each week I did mundane tasks like duping tapes, semi-interesting tasks like creating b-roll tapes for online edit sessions, sitting and watching the AVID editor edit, and really fun activities like going out on shoots. Here I learned some great lighting skills, how to conduct an interview and how to work with talent. We did some interesting shoots for Jose Cuervo, shooting margarita's and food. We did a cool shoot for an insurance company, with a dolly and film-style crew. This job was most similar to my career, so over the years I have referred to these experiences most of all.

Upon graduation I secured an entry level duping job. For the first 3 months I went on medical shoots around the country, learning the craft which I still practice today. Then came my big break re-editing a very complex video on an unknown to me Ampex editing system. Luckily the experiences discussed in these posts were just the preparation I needed.

Thanks for reading.

Mike

I had four, count 'em 4 internships in college. Aside from eliminating 4 semester-long classes from my schedule, they were one and all great experiences.

My sophomore year I attended a 4 week evening seminar, open to the public, given by the Hartford Ad Club - a consortium of ad agencies. Each class covered a different aspect of advertising, including guest speakers. One such speaker was from the local CBS affiliate WFSB. She arranged an interview for me with the News Director, or managing editor, or some such position, for an internship the next semester, Fall of my junior year.

Upon learning I got the internship at the assignment desk (at this point I did not know much about the news business), the semester ended and I went home. I should mention that by this time I had already secured a Summer internship working for the WCVB Mid-day news. I grew up watching WCVB in Boston so this was a dream come true. The folks at channel 5 were impressed someone so young was doing a Summer internship. So was I.

As Mid-day news intern, I worked Mon, Wed and Fri from 8:30am to 12:30pm. Basically the prep time for the Noon newscast, and the newscast itself.

Remember I was very green, so it was trial by fire.

My main jobs were:

1. Receive rundown from associate producer.

2. Prepare stories from morning newscast which were to be re-used at noon. Find the tape, cue it up, prepare a cue sheet, order supers and turn this in to the playback engineer.

3. Prepare new VO stories. Receive copy from producer or anchor. Log field tape if a new story, or search for and cue up stock footage from the library if a continuing story. Having not yet learned anything about editing in my college classes, it took some time for me to get the hang of matching picture to VO, plus pre-roll and pad at the end. But I figured it out. I also learned not to give a box of stock footage to the satellite truck driver just before it rolls away.

4. Assist with preparation of VO/SOT. Same as number 3, plus submitting supers to the Chyron operator. Learned a valuable lesson about checking spellings BEFORE air. If you are unsure, ask and ask again.

5. The real scramble came around 11:30am. Once the script for the show was finalized, it was printed on a 5 or 7 layer carbon printout - remember dot-matrix form feed paper. It was great when the paper ran out mid-print. Whoever invented the dot matrix printer feeding mechanism should be locked up. Once the scripts were printed, I had to rip the pages, collate into stacks, and deliver each color to the correct person - Susan Wornick and Jim Boyd, the anchors (they may still have those jobs 15 years later), the Director, TD, audio, playback, producer and possibly the news Director, can't be sure.

6. An even bigger scramble was the rundown. The final was printed and I had to make enough copies for all the same people. It would have made sense to just hit print 7 or 8 times, but I guess copier toner was cheaper than printer toner. It was not uncommon for one or more copiers to clog or run out of toner at 11:45 or so. One day I found myself in the Traffic department in another part of the building copying rundowns at 11:55am for the noon show. Arggh!

This went on for weeks. Every 4th Friday during the summer the station had a theme cookout and free ice cream truck after the noon broadcast, which was fun.

One day in August I got the opportunity to go in the field with a reporter. This was not part of my normal duties, or even a possibility. Who would give the canary script to Jim if I were out of the office? So I did this on a Sunday, on my own time. No problem there.

I should mention that just before school got out in May, I and a group of students, led by a grad student, had a meeting to plan the first ever U of Hartford live student newscast, to go on the air the following year. So my assignment was to figure out how to run a newscast.

I got to the station at 8am and sat with the assignment director until a story came in. I fire had erupted at one of those big apartment complexes you can see from Rt 128 in the Natick vicinity. I rode with the photog/shooter in his station wagon, and we shot the story sans reporter. He suggested I walk behind the fire chief so I could get in the picture. I made sure to use my walk on when I cut the story for the evening news (no noon show on Sunday).

Next was back to the station. George Bush, the original, was giving a press conference about Iraq. This was Summer of 1992, so airstrikes were periodically sent into Iraq. Must run in the family.

Anyway, David Boeri, the weekend hard news reporter and I went to interview retired general Bernard Trainor in his house. On this task I learned that news shooters are given a camera, a tripod, one Tota light if they are lucky, and a shoddy Ford to get there. So much for the glamrous microwave truck. We interviewed the general, which was cool, then raced back to the station. While David started cutting his story, I manned the satellite feed to log Bush's speech and pick out some sound bites. I also found some cool stock footage of carrier aircraft from the library, and this material then went into the story. I then raced home to watch the newscast with my parents. They were impressed with my day's work, as well as my walk on at the apartment fire.

So by the end of the Summer I had it all figured out. I even learned how to load the printer paper and fix the copier jams without breaking a sweat. I carefully studied the rundowns, cue sheets and logs on each videotape case. I also created my own form to use as a to-do list, and impressed the producer with my creativity. On my final day I got to cut a 2 minute story (the editor does the cutting, but I made all the decisions) and felt like I had figured it all out, and definitely got my money's worth (while the internship was unpaid, it counted towards 3 credits of coursework, which was like $1000.)

Upon my return to Hartford in September, I started my assignment desk internship. By comparison, it was boring. My job one full day per week was to answer the phone, taking phone calls from all the nuts who call reporting UFO sightings. I also had to call each state police barracks and ask if anything interesting happened. Generally the answer was no, and for some reason I dreaded these calls. One time a state police trooper had a finger bitten by a police dog.

One time I answered the phone and it was Oprah. My aunt Franny was impressed!

The union rules at WFSB were more strict than at WCVB, so I was not allowed to touch anything that didn't look like a telephone. Once while logging the daily CONUS feed I ejected a tape and put in the blank one and hit record. The engineer told me, very nicely, DON'T DO THAT AGAIN. Oh bother. So there was no editing for me on this internship.

What I did get to do almost every week was go out in the field with a reporter. I got to hold the microphone or other gear, and actually learned a lot about field reporting and shooting. On one occasion I told the shooter about my advanced tv production class assignment, to which he relied "That is totally useless."

During the Fall of 1992 we covered some political events. On one occasion we interviewed Jesse Jackson who was trying to get African Americans registered to vote in Hartford. That was cool.

Another time Barbara Bush was speaking at some auditorium, so we interviewed her which was very cool. At first the secret service wouldn't let me in the room, but when they asked who I was, they escorted me into the room. The reporter was David Ushery, who is now a big-time reporter with NBC. I think Mrs. Bush smiled at me, or perhaps she had gas!

My final brush with fame was in Woodbridge, CT. A man had killed his wife and child and then shot himself. We raced the satellite rig down and parked out front in the quiet neighborhood. To my dismay, riding in the SNG truck was akin to riding in a U-Haul. We went door to door asking neighbors about the man and got the cliche responses "oh, he was very nice." We waited for hours for the coroner to bring out the body bags. At one point the female reporter caught me taking a wizz in the woods across the street. What was I supposed to do?

Finally out came the bodies, we got our shots. Then Dr. Henry Lee, world famous forensic investigator arrived, and we interviewed him. The reporter was nice enough to introduce me and we shook hands. Sorry Dr. Lee, I had no where to wash my hands :)

Then came the live shot. I learned a valuable lesson as the truck operator was trying to connect to the satellite. If you have an intermittent problem, give the piece of equipment a good whack with your hand and it usually does the trick.

The live shot was around dusk, so I think I held the sun gun and the cell phone during the on camera report. That was cool too.

Finally on my last day, I got the hang of the assignment desk part of the gig, and actually wrote a story which was on the air. At that point I wished I could stay for a few more weeks.

Once the 5:00, 5:30 and 6:00 newscasts began, I had free run of the whole building. I could sit in the studio, stand in the control room or wander around. I was pleased when the news anchor Gerry Brooks knew my name in the elevator, and said he was glad I stopped wearing a suit jacket. For the record I never wore a suit jacket, although I did have a nice selection of ties. This was the best part of my day, because everyone outside the newsroom was very friendly, and was eager to teach me about their jobs. I spent a couple of hours with the online editor, watching him cut Bernies commercials (the local crazy eddie). I became friends with Hilton Kadderly, the local Willard Scott weather guy. He actually taught me a lot about news reporting and also demonstrated the cutting edge 3Dweather computer. I also got friendly with the paintbox operator and was also friendly with another reporter Jeff Cole, who sort of mentored me on a couple of stories. And did I mention I spoke with Oprah? Oh I did, never mind then.

By this time our student news cast was done with weekly rehearsals, we had our very own 2 chip SVHS camera and were going on the air in January. As the most experienced field reporter, I got the biggest news stories on campus. More on this later.

Well, as you can see, hind sight shows just how much I learned from my internships. But I still have 2 more semesters of internships to go over. That will have to wait, Oprah's on the line.

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

Mike

Introduction to Television Production, the first video class in my college curriculum, had an odd approach. You learn the Zetl textbook backwards and forwards. The black and white pictures of a two person ENG team with a hernia-inducing porta-pak system slung over their shoulders seemed pretty cool. Our first assignemtn was to "produce" a "how to" video, as a live to tape 5 minute studio production. "producer" meant "on-air talent." I was my job to write the script, assign each crew member a job and work with the "director" for that project. I was afraid of the director. He turned out to be a good friend later in college, but at the time he was this flannel wearing mountain man with no apparent verbal communication skills.

Anyway, most of the kids did "how to boil pasta" or "how to knit a sweater" or "how to deal crack from your dorm room." Ok the one about knitting a sweater was made up. I mean how could you knit a sweater in 5 minutes.

Being the geek that I was, I decided to do "How to Disarm a Nuclear Bomb." I carefully constructed my prop bomb out of various parts from Radio Shack and some chrome tape from the auto parts department at Ames. To my dismay, I was not allowed to have the chrome parts on camera. "You'll burn the tubes!"

So my bomb looked like a cardboard box with some wires sticking out of it. That being said try getting it on a plane these days.

Since I had written and rehearsed the script, I blew through my prepared material in about 4 minutes. When I saw the dot-matrix printer paper fall away from the teleprompter, I had to start improvising. I will try to post the video on here at some point. Anyway, it was an interesting although somewhat useless experience. The goal was for us to learn the different roles in the tv studio. However there was so much chaos before each show that we all learned how not to do a live show. So I guess we did learn something.

The next semester was Advanced TV Production, also a studio based class.

The first project was a "vignette," that is, a brief video created in the studio, intended to be a convincing representation of another situation. My assignment was "an airport." My partner was a drug addict. Needless to say I kept the power tools away from him. We drove up to our local airport and scoped out all the airport-looking areas. We settled on the monitor wall next to the American ticket counter.

We decided to create the lower half of the wall, have people walking in front of the wall, and we recorded some airport announcements and a shot of the arrivals monitor to use as an insert.

After a trip to my local home center, we built perhaps the most heavy duty prop in the history of television. Our 8 foot wide by 4 foot high airport wall must have weighed 150 pounds. We had to put it on my roommate's station wagon roof to transport it to the studio.

The end result was actually pretty convincing, albeit a bit long. Lesson learned, don't over do things. A sheet of painted luan would have accomplished the same thing for less money, paint, weight and hassle.

The final project was a group drama. We needed to do a live to tape tv show, any genre. Once again, I was given the group of rejects. I wonder what those kids are doing today. )I know one guy is an antiques dealer. It's actually the drug addict from above!) The other group got all the best kids and did a funny sitcom, along the lines of Men Behaving Badly. My professor must have put me in charge of my group because he figured I could carry the team. He was wrong. It was a disaster. Apologies 15 years out to my friends Craig and Atara. You guys were my actors and I put you through agony. That was one tape I did not save.

Over the past two years I have done several live to tape studio shoots. Each experience had lessons of its own, to be discussed in a future post. One of the best experiences was at a college studio in Hartford. One of the staff was the very same guy who did the sitcom described above.