February Update: Playing Catch-Up

Hey team!

Getting Back on Schedule

This update is a wee bit late. I was booking it to get the Monkey Island video done by the end of February, so I let the update slide, and then it slid a little longer. This will be a theme in this update.

Where the channel stands right now is my Indivisible Somerville talk serves as December's video, and Three Short Arguments about The Secret of Monkey Island is January's, which means I still owe you February. The goal was to get the Monkey Island video done in early February and spend the rest of the month working on another video, but: once I'd accepted that it was coming out in February instead of January, I decided, well, February is February, might as well alternate editing with writing scripts.

The upshot of this is that, while January's video came out at the very end of February, the next two scripts are written and I think I can get them both out this month, which will get us caught up.

As ever, there's no single reason for the delays. After the holidays and somewhat overbooking my January, I finally made the switch to Premiere and that switch was just kind of hard.

Using Premiere

Premiere and Final Cut Pro 7 are, in many ways, nearly identical, especially since you can set Premiere's hotkeys to be literally the same as FCP's. (Premiere knew they were trying to steal Final Cut's audience during the transition from Final Cut 7 to Final Cut X, and it worked damn well.) My difficulty was more... philosophical.

As ever, there are German words for what I'm talking about - Zuhanden and Vorhanden - which have to do with how we embody tools. (No, I don't have them memorized, I just looked them up.) Basically, the idea is that we think of tools as an extension of our bodies (Zuhanden) until they stop working properly (Vorhanden). We think of a bike as an extension of our legs until we get a flat tire, we think of a hammer as an extension of our arm until the head gets wobbly. Once there is friction between you and the object, it ceases to feel like a part of you, and is now an object that needs to be contended with, fixed, mastered, whatever.

Final Cut had become a pretty shitty program for me by the time I stopped using it. FCP7 hadn't been supported in years and got buggier with every system update. There were a lot of tedious foibles about the system that I just had to deal with. There are a lot of visual glitches in my videos that are a result of bad compression or weird rendering errors. But it was the devil I knew! Warts and all, Final Cut was an extension of my brain when I was editing.

Premiere wasn't. It was a thing I had to learn. In almost every way, it is a better tool. I get prettier video files at smaller sizes, it recovers projects after crashes fabulously, be able to edit unrendered footage is a dream, and I can even keep using the program while it's exporting a video.

But it was unfamiliar. And not knowing my tools made editing a lot more complicated.

This is part of why I put up with Final Cut for so long, because there is always an awkward period when I transition from one tool to another. Probably making that transition when I was already behind schedule was a bad move, but before I could even try Premiere I needed to update my OS to High Sierra, at which point FCP7 officially didn't work anymore. There was no going back.

Anyway, not trying to offer excuses, and by the end I was really getting the hang of Premiere. Just thought I'd share a bit about the editing life by way of explanation.

Perks & Rewards

The plan for jumping into long overdue BTS blog posts and annotated videos is still on, though, with two videos coming out this month, it may not be as quick as I'd planned. I'll try to get something up this month, but the videos will have to take priority, so it's going to happen wherever I find the time.

I will also start getting the ball rolling on the bonus project after we are caught up on videos.

Reminders

This was mentioned in a previous update, but I will be paneling at PAX East on April 8th (obligatory NMH link) and was recently on an episode of Serious Inquiries Only. I've made it a rule not to do any traveling, paneling, presentations, or podcasts between now and PAX; I want to focus on the channel for a little while and see what an uninterrupted stretch of work time can accomplish.

Alright, that's it for me! I will endeavor to get March's update up in a few weeks, though there may not be a ton to say by then.

Cheers,

-I