Editing...

I have a huge backlog of video edits to be done. I had planned to get through them over Christmas - but as you can see, was having too much fun eating non-stop for 3 weeks.

Most of the edits are of church services where we typically run 3 cameras. Rather than mix live, the three sets of tapes are dumped to the PC.

They are then loaded into the editor and are synced up on their sound track. Basically I listen for the first snare drum hit (or similar) on each track, then slide them to line them all up.

With the editing software - I have this brill "multicamera" editing mode (as seen here). What happens is that I press play - and all three tapes run in sync (the smaller pics on the right monitor). I then sit back and simply select each camera in turn that I want like a live producer. This is much quicker than going through lots of small edits.

I then have some macros I've written to add transition effects.

Finally I take the audio recording from the main desk and overdub that for the finished video. The DVD menus and titles are then added last.

As you can see, takes quite some time. Almost essential justification for having twin 24" monitors connected to your PC.

On a more complex (artistic) video edit, I typically allow 3hrs editing time per min of final footage.

Work today consisted of writing some partnership agreements, writing some newsletter articles, then phoning some of my west coast US customers asking them why they hadn't placed any orders with us recently.