The Digital Director Experience: Video Editing Fundamentals

I've been sniffing around ways to waste money over the last few days. You know how it is. You fool yourself into thinking you need that new bit of kit, when really what hou need is to get out and be productve. My latest obsession is backing up, and boy can you spend a pretty penny on external harddrives. So it's proven an admirable a perfect way to waste a few hundred quid. Thing is, it's probably one of the rare times when my passion for spending is justified. I've been caught out by drive failures in the past, so these days I tend to liberally sprinkle my videos over varies medium. In fact I dug a drive out of the loft at the weekend and have decided to bring fresh life to my old videos by re-encoding the sources DV-AVI to MP4.

I already have a 2TB nas drive which backs up all my original source video (or at least the bits that were used in the final edit), but it doubles up as a time machine back up for my mac mini (full to the brim with videos, pictures and music). So I plan to use that solely for time machine back ups, and invest in a time capsule to hook up to my mac to provide more space. Then invest in a few portable hard drives to back up my backups and store them at my folks house. It's all very sensible and boring.

So sensible that I was easily side tracked into REALLY wanting a MacBook. And with the 13 inch almost within the "impulse" buy bracket, it's becoming too much of a temptation. So I set about researching if it could handle premier pro. However, I made the mistake of thinking all video editors are like us. Seems most are purists. They laugh in the face of people editing on lap tops. Apparently, unless your screen is the size of small semi-detached house, you'll go blind staring at the screen. And if you edit on anything less tha 3 drives, you'll wait 3 days for your 1 minutes film to render. So I'm no closer to knowing if it's practical to run premiere.

However, I have a cunning plan. I downloaded the trial of cs5.5 last night, and plan to install it on my mac mini. The could cost me a grand... I'll let you know how I get on.