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I know, I should be politically correct and wish you a happy festive season. But I’m not. Either way, here comes a little greeting from yours truly.

What I love about the internet is that sometimes you get ideas that throw you just a bit off your standard way of thinking. Just by surfing around. Over at Geeks are Sexy (you just gotta love that title!), I found this video that I want to share with you. Everybody is talking about the imminent dangers that global warming brings. Prepare for an emotional joy-ride! Read the rest of this entry »

It appears that some of the web hikers want to abuse the term “Martin Luther King”. Read more about it here. Everyone with a blog or a website, can do his/her part in countering that. Here comes mine:

Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King

Thanks to Doug for bringing this to my knowledge.

For the past three days I have been in Germany, working on a commercial in Hamburg. Well, I thought it was one commercial, but it turned out to be three commercials. To make things interesting, one (the main) commercial was shot on 4:3, while the other two were in widescreen. This meant keeping mentally alert, as to switching tapes and format according to which show I was working for. But everything went fine, and the client seemed happy.

Then yesterday I went to Hamburg airport for my return to Oslo. Hamburg airport is (and it feels like it has been in the past couple of years) one big construction site. Or rather, a fluctuating number of construction sites. It has two terminals. If one, for the sake of argument let’s say: me, arrives at the wrong terminal, it turns out that it takes almost half an hour to walk the - theoretically short - distance to the other terminal. Some pathways are simply blocked. You have to change floor levels. Some signs are hidden. Elevators are wide enough to not fit a tripod-bag through.

After half an hour one arrives at the right terminal, only to see an amazing queue of people in front of the Lufthansa check-in. No one seems to know where things are happening, so I simply join in. There’s still a good hour before my flight leaves. Fast forward half an hour, and I am actually checking in. Talking to a very friendly Lufthansa employee, who turns out to be a fan of Norway and asks me about the employment situation. He also tags my bags with a priority tag. Thanks. Oh, and he informs me that my plane is 1 hour delayed, which means that I might catch my connecting flight in Frankfurt. Not only do I have to fly about 600 kilometers into the wrong direction, it might even take the whole day.

Since I have some spare time, I spot a little section in the airport, where they

welcome any input on our airport.

Cool, I can tell them that it might not be so smart that you need to have a 1 Euro coin in order to get a trolley. Since many people who arrive at an international airport might not have a 1 Euro coin. (Just for the record, mytrolley turned out to work with a 10 kroner coin. But then, there are even fewer people with 10kr coins.) So I grabbed a form, started reading it, took the pen that was permanently installed in the booth. And - well, the pen was empty. Not just empty of ink, there was no ballpen cartridge inside at all. I had to laugh.

An hour later, and having chatted with my fellow travellers (who also thought they could have done other things than rushing out of bed at 6 a.m. on a saturday morning, only to wait one hour), we finally boarded the plane. There we were told that the reason for the delay was a problem with the plane we originally should have taken. Well, put in perspective I must say that I prefer them delaying us, rather than using a faulty plane.

We arrived in Frankfurt at the exact time that I should have boarded my plane to Oslo. The flight attendend suggested that I should try to get to the plane as fast as I could. Which turned out to be not so fast, because the gateway out of the plane decided that it did not want to work today. So we had to wait for a bus, which then shuttled us to the other side of the airport. There I started running (remember, I am travelling with a camera that weighs about 15 kg), only to find out that the airport is about the size of Frankfurt - or so it feels. Of course, one has to change levels every now and then, and there are queues in front of the lifts. So I take the stairs. Sweating.

Heart pounding I arrive at the right gate for Oslo, and it is still open. Yes! I jump into the bus - but it turns out that they are not waiting especially for me, there must have been other delays as well. So, I wait for 15 minutes in the bus. 3 more exhausted passengers arrive, before we are being shuttled to the plane. A short while later I am in the air.

But the travel story is not yet finished. For in Oslo only one of my bags arrive at the baggage pick up. I always knew I would lose a baggage once. Naturally, it happened this time. But I had to smile: All the time in Germany it was very mild and blue skies. Norway was pouring with autumn rain. So I travelled only in a short armed shirt. And guess where my rain jacket was? Yes - somewhere in Frankfurt. Well, I got to the train counter, only to be informed that the train I had planned on taking, was full. I was supposed to wait another hour.

I didn’t.

I just boarded the full train and sat in the aisle. I really had done enough waiting for a day. It was time not only to go home, but to arrive.

It’s good to be home.

The misplaced baggage arrived today (while I was under the shower), only a day later than promised.

About 3 years ago we (which means either the company I work for, or me and my wife) set upon making a documentary. A film, which was big in ambition and – being an unknown production company – small in budget. Now, we are finally drawing to a close. After numerous re-edits, re-shoots and re-thoughts, tomorrow we’ll show a sort-of final cut to 2 financeers.

The last weeks have been quite, er, busy. For me that meant a lot of graphics work, mixing, finding music, finding sounds, finding stills, clearing rights, finding archive footage, clearing rights again, transferring everything into FCP, colour correcting, chosing colour schemes and filters, making backups, fixing hardware hic-ups, and so on. My wife did, as always, a glorious editing job.

The other day, after a day of fixing some glitches in the footage, I came home to my lovely daughters. When Eva (1 1/4 years old) showed me her tongue, and I saw some white stuff on it, my first thought was “now which filter do I use to fix that one?”. I knew I needed a brake.

Long hours over a stretched period of time and creativity just don’t mix. Even though it may be tempting to work “just one more hour” (which usually means working till afer midnight), it is better to resist and get some off-time. Ease yourself with the knowledge that your brain will keep working on the problem anyway, and the next day you’ll easily find a fix for a previous impossible problem.

Earlier this year we updated our editing equipment. Before we were using a 20″ iMac with 2gig of memory, and couple of LaCie firewire drives. Then, within 3 days, two of our 4 macs had a hardware failure. This, naturally, came amidst a pressing deadline. With a speedy re-installation of FCP on the old, trusty Quicksilver G4, we managed to send the film just in time. But I learned, that we needed a dedicated editing machine.

After some soul- and google-searching, the decision was to go for a Quad G5. Upgraded to the next best grahics card (we are doing some Motion graphics, but not so much that we should pay the premium for the fastest, meanest graphics card.) Memory was upgraded to 4.5 gigs, then the question came to what sort of display. The geek in me wanted a 30″ Apple display. But after some calculation, as to how many pixels one gets for either one 30″ or two 23″, it became clear, that the two-screen solution would be the one to go for. Reading up on the Apple discussion forum I noticed some buzz around the Dell 24″ displays. Looking at the specs, it soon became clear that they were a definite contender for the Apple 23″. Yet the Apple pieces are gorgeous. Hmm…

To my rescue came a friendly Dell account manager, that came just with the right offer. I ended up ordering two of the Dells, and paid only slightly more than what one single, lonely, individual, isolated, lone, secluded, solitary Apple display would have cost. With the added advantage of being able to switch inputs.

In the future I want to upgrade our 3rd monitor - the broadcast CRT. For now it is a JVC 9″, which also doubles as field monitor. This one gets its signal from a Sony DSR-11, which we bought late last year. I also added a Behringer tactile mixing console, which looks magical when in use, if a little bit noisy. For input we use a customized FCP keyboard (which has been doing its job since I bought FCP 1.25), a contour jog shuttle and an Apple 3 button mouse (boy, was I happy the day I could remove the MS 3 button mouse - this meant that finally our office was PC free). For audio monitoring we are using some fancy-ish computer speakers, but they will be upgraded in the not too far future. For critical sound-work, headphones are used (also for reasons of ambient noise from the street; did I mention that our office is only 3 minutes from the beach?).

All put together, it does look pretty impressive. And I love the screen saver I installed. It simply displays random magic-related words or phrases on either screen. Lovely understatement.

Now, let’s finally get to the headline of this post.

The last couple of months we have been mainly working on our own projects, especially our – so far - longest project, a 45 minute documentary. Here I have enjoyed the processing speed of the Quad mainly when it came down to doing complex filters, and of course burning DVDs.

Today I had an editing session for an insurance company. New for me, the client was attending the session. So speed was of essence. And how well we worked; after 4 1/2 hours we had managed to log 2 miniDV tapes and 1 DVD, transfer the needed sections into FCP, cut it, add some nice animated graphics, do some basic colour correction, add fitting soundtrack, and put the finished 7 minute piece all on a DVD. This I could have never accomplished, had it not been for the speed of the G5, the experience with knowing which filters might be the right ones, and heavy useage of the F10 key.

So, what I learned again (and have found proven over and over again in the camera world), is that, yes, the creative mind/eye behind the machinery is the single most important factor in making a successful storytelling. But, with proper equipment, this creative mind can achive its full potential.

In other words, yes, an excellent editor can tell a story with iMovie. But (s)he will tell it much better with FCP and proper hardware.