11th Hour Stuff

There's a process in album making (which, yes, becomes a CD), called "mastering."  It's where the EQ is taken care of and the spaces are placed between the songs, etc., etc.  Sound engineers do this work.  I'm used to the "final" process in making albums but I'm new to video editing.  Once I finished editing "Voices of the Homeless," I asked myself what more it needed to look good and sound its best and decided to hire a video engineer to fluff and tickle the entire project in Final Cut Pro (I edited in iMovie 11) before I started screenings . . . before I considered it done.

The first problem was he took several days to even start when I thought it would have been completed last week.  Then instead of it taking him "a couple of hours" to do the work it took six.  Then when we watched it together, I saw he had made some "improvements," which I had to ask him to un-improve.

Trust me, the project looks much richer in color and much more balanced in sound -- but this was a hassle!!  Then he got sick over the weekend when I expected we'd be done already.  It goes without saying that I started losing sleep.  Last night, Monday, we finally finished.  The first private screening is Wednesday and we weren't finished until last night!  An 11th hour person I am not.

And finally on the list of issues was that his computer would not burn copies of the discs.  It kept crashing.  Three copies were successfully made and he's still trying to burn three more.  So he still has my hard drive!  I miss my hard drive!

But I've got a copy for the first screening and other copies to start sending out to festivals.

First screening - CAPS-TV Ventura, CA where I edited the project, Wednesday the 15th.