DAM! - no I’m not swearing, I’m referring to Digital Asset Management. Since the digital revolution I’ve collected thousands of video clips, still images, audio files and graphics on a hard drive very much in those categories to use in edits. I’ve bought assets from video and photo libraries, special offer packages, Royalty Free music as digital downloads and CD’s which I’ve digitised, it’s a case of you never know when you might need to use them, the problem arises trying to keep track of them all and have fast access when trying to find something for an edit.

‘Forget everything you’ve ever learned using tracks in Final Cut Pro’, that was the advice when Final Cut Pro X was launched in June 2011. I remember that day along with many thousands of others, awaiting the launch of FCPX, I’d been using non-linear editing since early 1994, originally with Media100 from Data Translation which was marketed as the the first ‘broadcast quality’ non-linear editor. In 2001 I switched to Final Cut Pro v2.1 which then, cost around £1600 if I remember. When Apple switched from Motorola to Intel chips, FCP 6 Studio2 was launched and I bought the new version for around £800, then later again the v7 upgrade, luckily I found a genuine boxed version on eBay for £150.

A year of editing Sunday services for Glebe Chapel. It started in March 2020 when I offered to loan Glebe Chapel a tripod after a post on Facebook mentioning one of theirs had broken, a Facebook message came back ‘Could I edit a few video clips together and upload it to Youtube?’. Little did anyone know we’d still be editing Sunday services one year on!

I’ve been using computers since we bought an Amstrad PCW back in 1986/87, I went on to an Amiga for video titling in around 1989 and then to an Apple Mac for digital non-linear editing in 1994, since then I’ve owned the full range of MacPro’s from a PowerMac 7100 in 1994 to the last cheesegrater in 2011/12, I’m now on a late 2015 iMac with Big Sur and the latest Final Cut Pro.

Over the years I’ve swapped out PCI cards, installed new hard drives, swapped mechanical HD’s for SSD’s, swapped RAM around and even upgraded processors so I think I know my way around Macs. Around 9 months ago my current Final Cut Pro ‘working’ Mac, a 5.1 maxed out with SSD’s, Metal GFX card and RAM started randomly re-starting, it seemed to happen when using Final Cut Pro, RapidWeaver or browsing the web more than at any other time, I first thought it was overheating, during one important edit session with several re-starts, I placed a big fan on the floor with the side off the Mac and that failed to resolve the re-starts, I then suspected one fan on the 3Gb GFX card was faulty so I replaced it with a 3 fan 4Gb card, the problem still occured.

Over the past 20 years or so we’ve been asked to shoot a few artist / band songs, these usually involved shooting several takes in different locations and using a CD boom box to play the song out for lip syncing, then in the edit, use the CD as the main audio track to sync to the video using the recorded audio, then drop the camera recorded audio for the final video output.