Sat 18th July 2020
At last I am nearing the end of the jazz band film clip saga, only because my dear friend Spiro solved it for me.
Interestingly , the drama of life didn’t allow it to be too easy , as I’d sent the project file to him to see if he could troubleshoot it in a spare moment- and of course, he didn’t have a spare moment as he had some serious deadlines himself ( he digitises just about every old media format known ).
When he looked at it , he located the problem within five minutes and told me-
“You didn’t have the correct frame size, it was 600% too high.”
It was very fundamental for any video editor to know, and hadn’t been a problem in previous projects I’d done , as I’d always simply flown in footage from my camera and the project automatically formatted to the correct frame size.
However, since I’d started with these unusually large Tiff files , the whole project auto formated to that size , and so began the problems.
Things moved a lot faster from then on and I was able to address other details in the clip. I started to enjoy a more free running creative process.
Of course I found new things that I had to learn but gradually I surmounted those issues.
There came a moment where I was was so buried in detail that I started to wonder whether I would ever finish the clip.
I decided that I would just look at the whole clip to get an objective over view .
I did that and got a bit of a shock- it was mostly complete! The worst was over.
There was only tweaking to be done.
It highlighted the fact that it was important to step back regularly and maintain some poise. Hardest to do in the most threatening situations of course.
Also, I realised I’d fallen into the type of trap that I wouldn’t allow myself to do in my area of expertise (that is , music)- where I didn’t research deeply enough about the technical requirements necessary to be able to do such a complicated task.
This is an important theme, I feel, in the creative process- striking a balance between unbridled creativity and practicality.
I’m very much a believer in ‘just doing it’ and have done that so many times.
There is a point however , where one has to ask the very practical question- “am I up to this? “ . If the answer is ‘no’, then the next question is “ what do I need to do to fulfil the task? ”
In my case , with the film clip, the answer was to do a day or two extra research.
Not desperate , ‘on the fly’ type of reseach, but singular, systemmatic, research with pen and notebook, putting aside my distaste for online tutorials, and work from the basics, in order, up to the more complex.
This is what I ask students to do when I teach music , so the same should apply to me , with tasks that are beyond my expertise.
This is something I’ve noticed over the years, that when a task threatens me, I can go into a state of disconnect, in which the approach to the situation can lose the inherent practicality I would have learnt in many life situations and so the approach begins to lean towards being delusion.
The ‘head in the sand’ perspective.
“I’ll just close my eyes and drive really fast through this traffic intersection and everything will be ok!”
Anyway , I completed a first cut version and sent to my friend Spiro to appraise. He liked it and had about a dozen points to help improve it.
Today I will be finishing the second edited cut and hope that is nearly the end.
The c;ip should be up in a couple of days.
cheers,
Michael
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