On The Cutting Edge and Teetering    

"FREE PIE When you super size!"

I am coveting that sign from the fast food restaurant up the street. My best friend and I are obsessed with strange signs. We like the concept of taking an odd sign and putting it in a place where it would be even more out of place. All through college, we plotted what sign we would post in front of the Administration Building at our almamater, Eastern New Mexico University. Our sophomore year we found a sign in the city landfill that stated "Hey Kids, Happy Meals 99 cents!" and showed a butcher wielding a giant knife. But by our senior year, we loved the sign too much to give it to our bizarre cause. It now hangs in my laundry room. One of the other odd signs decorating my home is the placard on my bathroom door. It is the typical faux wood with engraved white lettering that says "Editing Bays".       

Aside from the years of enjoyment my best friend has had from directing visitors in my house to the "edit bay", the sign brings me much joy every time I see it. The sign is from the door that used to lead to the three edit bays at KENW-TV in Portales, NM. It was in those bays, I learned to edit. I do not know how other people have learned to edit video tape, sometimes I am not sure how I learned to edit.      

I walked into KENW a few days before the beginning of my freshman year of college and introduced myself to the news director, John Weadock. I had worked in radio news for three years prior go going to college, so the audio side of editing was nothing new to me, it was just the video stuff I needed to learn. John probably would not have given me the time of day except for I was from his favorite part of the state. We spent several hours discussing old school cattle ranching, the color of the sky and the whisper of the prairie in God's country, a.k.a. northern New Mexico. After a while John mentioned he would need a new chief editor in for the spring semester and he thought I would be perfect for the job. We walked in the edit bays and he said, "You can learn all this in a semester, you can probably learn it in a week". I appreciated his vote of confidence, but I never saw so many buttons and knobs in my radio career. There was also a big box with a joy stick and more buttons, the only thing I recognized was the audio mixer. He then handed me the 50 page instruction book to the edit controller and said, "I have never touched these bays, so I am not much help. Play around, have fun with it today and tomorrow, read through this, you will get it, you will be editing for the newscast starting Monday".          

I took a pile of 3/4 inch video tapes from the discard pile and started punching buttons. I remember putting a tape in the record machine and snapping my hand back like it tried to bite me. I took advantage of the small victories: rewind, play, stop. After reading the instruction book cover to cover, I moved into actual editing. Insert, assemble, A1, A2, it was all so foreign. After three hours in the edit bay, I emerged with a 45 second piece of edited video. As the days went by, I got faster, much faster and more accurate with the edits.        

That was eight years ago and editing is now second nature. I will always be a better editor than photographer. I can do a mediocre job of shooting a story. But in the edit bay, I will breathe life into it. Working in master control for four years made me a fast editor. When I started shooting, that made me a more conscientious editor. I thought I knew a lot about editing until last week.        

WRAL Chief Photographer Richard Adkins cornered me in an edit bay on Wednesday afternoon. He loomed in the doorway, "What are you doing with your mornings for the rest of the week?" Since I had no idea where this could be headed, and I work nightside (2:30 to 11:30 pm), I replied, "Sleeping, but if it is something good, I could change those plans." He smirked, "There is an HD project that needs edited, a hockey game."   Trying to contain myself, I bounced in my chair, "That sounds great, much better than sleeping, what do I need to do?" As Richard explained where the tapes and the edit bay were and who I needed to contact, I tried to concentrate. But my mind raged with the electricity you get when you are a little kid and your Mom says, "We're going to Disneyland".       

When I worked in radio, we had a daily feature that started with a clap of thunder and a synthesized voice whispered, "FLASSSSHHHHHBACK!"

          Richard then explained he had not used the edit system yet and that I would need to figure it out for myself. I am sure John Weadock felt a cold tingle go up his spine at that moment.   I reassured myself that I had eight years of editing 3/4, 1 inch, 2 inch, S-VHS, MII, Beta and I was starting into DVC Pro. I gladly accepted the opportunity and went back to editing 3 X 4 format tape knowing that 24 hours from that moment I would not look at editing the same again.          

Richard showed me some raw tape from a documentary shot in High Definition during my interview last September.   The monitor was so theatrical. Not like movie screen theatrical (even though it actually is), the appearance is reality, like my TV set at home. But it is so over exaggerated, twice as wide as a normal set, that it has whimsical feel to it. And then there is the picture.          

Television cameras take the "color" of light and intensify it. In real life, the color of light at sunset has a yellow or orange tinge to it. But a TV camera reads the yellow light and makes everything bathed in it very yellow, even if it does not necessarily look like that to the human eye.          

Now take that intensity of color, add the infinite detail you see in real life, give it CD quality sound and make it feel like you are watching a movie. That is HD.       

The only other time I watched HD was a Sunday afternoon NFL football game. My Mom is the BIGGEST Denver Broncos fan in the world, and my Grandfather was as well. So I have watched football on TV every Sunday and Monday of my life, regardless of who was playing, because eventually they will play the Broncos and my Mom is their scout. Football on TV has never looked so incredible. I was so enthralled by the fact you could see the stitches on the ball, the divots in the field, sweat dripping off the face guard of the quarterback's helmet, I cannot even tell you who was playing, it was just too beautiful.          

It is hard to imagine that we will be shooting day to day TV news in such detail in the next two years.   Thank God my station has a "no dead bodies" policy. There are some things you just don't want to see in such detail. I fear for folks in news markets where the uncovered corpse is the opening shot.          

But my editing project was not dead bodies or anything remotely unpleasant. I had one tape of an NHL hockey game shot from the top level of the Greensboro Coliseum. This tape had one audio channel of the announcer calling the plays and another audio channel of the crowd cheering or booing. I had another tape shot rink side against the glass. My project was to edit all the plays back to back, take out the boring stuff like refs conferring on a call, create a seamless announcer track, cover all the bad camera moves with crowd shots and cover some of the plays from tape one with some of the shots from the glass.

Here were the challenges. There were not two cameras at the game. In other words, tape one was shot during the first period, tape two was shot during the second period so the plays that I am trying to match from up top to the shots from the glass are not the same plays, in some instances, not the same players. Another challenge was that tape two was shot from the opposite side of the rink as tape one, so the goalies are playing for the wrong team according to how tape one sets up the rink in the 'theatre of the mind". The technical term is "crossing the axis", when I figured out what had happened, I had some more colorful terms than that. The biggest challenge: I was editing in uncharted waters. There are two other people at the station who know how to edit on the HD system and I had no idea where to find them if I got in a bind.

As I descended into the HDTV Fantasyland located in the retired Black and White Photo lab in the bowels of the station, I wished I had brought the sign off my bathroom door as a little reminder of how far I have come. I remember the day they gutted the KENW edit bays to make room for the new non-linear system. I was working in master control that night and saw the door propped against the control room wall. So much of my knowledge was gained behind that door. The door was headed to the university warehouse where it would either go to auction or be used in a dorm. I got a screw driver from engineering and quickly pried the "Editing Bays" sign off the door as a memento.

The HD edit bay took my breath away. Five tape machines, a switcher, an edit controller, a huge audio mixer, half a dozen monitors, it was 1991 all over again. I was on the time clock, so I could not waste a lot of time taking in the magnitude of the edit bay. "Small victories, figure out what you know", I told myself. Instead of the abundant discard 3/4 tapes of yore, I had one rare D5 record tape and three HDCam source tapes. There were two different kinds of machines, two players and the recorder were D5 and two HDCam machines. I laughed to myself at the simplistic thought process I was having to walk myself through, "D5 tape in D5 machine, HDCam tape in HDCam machine." I moved on to the small victories, "Play, rewind, stop." Within a few minutes I was editing like an old pro. But every few minutes I would look up to review an edited segment and be spellbound by the High Definition picture.

It took about eight hours of editing to produce the 23 minute project. Only the keenest eyed hockey fan would figure out the "up top" shots and the plays at the glass are from different periods with different players. The only way you can tell is by looking at the jersey numbers. Oh, but wait, it's HD, you can see the jersey numbers, who made the jersey, how many teeth the player has, what size skate he wears....

As the technology becomes more crisp, we will not be able to get away with as many old editing tricks like that. There is a big relearning process on the horizon for photographers and editors. But no matter how far we go, it will all come back to what was learned long ago in the "Editing Bays".

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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