Over the past three months, I've been working for Silverback Films as a technical assistant, launching myself into the exciting world of Avid and motion-picture workflows (Silverback Films, previously Wild Horizons, are best known for their Disney Nature projects, Chimpanzee and African Cats). This is, in general, a fairly familiar experience to my work as a Production Technical Assistant at Icon Films, except that I'm no longer required to look into the logistics of acquiring camera kit, only the technicalities of accommodating various different formats (HDCAM SR, RED RAW, etc). Whilst camera manufacturers all attempt to reassure you that this is a painless process, as I've mentioned in a previous post, the land of formats, codecs and software can be a bit of nightmare, especially when mixing footage from several different formats... so part of my job is ironing out those difficulties and testing workflows.
Additionally, my new role entails 'building' edit suites and establishing connections to shared storage, either via high-speed Fibre-Channel or Ethernet. Despite the on-paper complexity of running and maintaining Avid Media networks, Avid, to their credit, make day-to-day maintenance of such intimidating infrastructures quite simple, and the advantages of shared storage far outweigh those of individual hard-disks.
Of course, it would be wrong of me to say that I've slipped seamlessly into the role, and I'm very appreciative of the patience that my colleagues have had with me whilst I battle the steep learning curve.
Alongside my normal job, I've also been continuing with a few freelance projects, including some web-design of all things. Until very recently, when the expedition came to an end, I built and maintained a website for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Instituion, the results of which can be seen here: http://www.greenlandsfrozencoast.com/. Whilst I don't actively search for work in web-design, I do find all aspects of the Internet rather fascinating, and enjoy the challenge of creating content for it... I'm just a lot more comfortable within the realms of Final Cut Studio (which I haven't forgotten about, of course).
Meanwhile, I continue to experiment with Avid Media Composer and Symphony from a creative perspective, engaging with its nuances and discovering why it has become such a successful industry standard.
Anyway, I think that's probably enough writing about myself for one day. Thanks for reading.
