Organization. (Wow, this entry is boring already isn’t it…) Don’t give up on me yet, because a huge part of my job here at Citizen involves organizing… and it’s important. I keep our content department in order and have spent the last three years keeping track of literally thousands of tapes for our shows, including the transcripts and logs and notes that go along with them. When an editor asks me “Where is that shot of Giada cutting those purple flowers?” or “Remember that time that one guy climbed a coconut tree?” I check my logs… I look up tape numbers in the library and… Boom. Got it. Easy.
But that was then. Now we shoot a good percentage of our shows on solid state media. I understand the advantages that come along with shooting straight to drives, but try to see this from my point of view! These media cards have eliminated not only tapes but also crushed my highly organized world of logs and script notes and tapes and tape libraries into one little drive. One little drive that mocks me with it’s mass of unlogged mystery footage.
Well it did anyway. It has definitely been a learning process on my side of things, but I’m slowly learning to love, or at least appreciate, solid state. The key is logging. By logging the footage on the drives and keeping simple lists of it, I can find shots just as easily as I once could. As an added bonus I can look at the footage on my computer before handing it off and I don’t even need to schedule an editor to didge in the clips once I find them. The future is here. Now if only I can find a program to do the logging for me…
Heather Hansen