Computerizing was tough

Happy New Year! I figured I'd finally act on an undeclared New Year's resolution and start updating this blog every eon or so.

When I think of my television career to this point, the past must be referenced, because there's really been no "present" to speak of. I took the day shift at work to try and pursue volunteer TV efforts in the area. In three months, I've been to one shoot - and the guests were both no-shows. So I often think to a happier time when I surrounded myself with the genre, and many happy times that resulted.

However, I found out I preferred older recording & playing methods barely three years into my experience. In my final year of college, computer systems were installed in the old analog video editing labs, and we were required to get a crash-course on how to use them. Initially, I thought this would take some of the fun out of the old way of editing projects, simply because the old way was the only way I knew how.

But I would never had guessed how the fun would be siphoned out: the computers themselves. The brainy idea to "go digital" was years ahead of its time, but the manufacture of the product was woefully short in planning. I prided myself in editing hour-long and half-hour-long shows. You couldn't do more than about two minutes' material before the computers would run out of memory.

This, provided they even worked at all. My friend John was the TV person at the college, with a great background and a smart television mind. But his resources were under-utilized for a semester, as he was always in the labs, cursing in trying to find a fix to where we could edit projects, while waiting the inevitable wait for new computer chips to be ordered and brought in.

That final semester required that our last three projects be edited digitally. They were edited the old-fashioned way; we had to, in order to actually have a product to show the teacher. He could not deny us our passing grades, because we had made the effort to use the computers as much as John put forth the effort trying to maintain them. I, of course, had little patience for them, and gave up on them quicker than most other people. Like a good technician should, I recognized the technical problem quickly, and devised plans to work around it.

Now I see where digital editing is the only place to go these days, and I do find myself lacking in the requisite computer skills. It wasn't because the college refused to teach it that way. It was because the idea was years ahead of its time, years ago, and we were very slow in accepting it.

Where passing grades mattered, it left forward thinkers like me no other choice.