You can all rest easy now

For those of you who were losing sleep over my lost remote, rejoice and be merry, for it has be found! Deep in the crevices of the couch of course. Yes, obviously I had looked there already, but last night the fucking DVD remote went missing too. I again tore the place apart and then started on the couch. DVD remote was jammed in the couch, so I fished it out, and during that process, felt another remote. Motherfucker I said! Motherfucker indeed. It was in there deep.

So that's kind of dirty. Hmm.

So yes, the wallet, the trashbags and the remote are all where they should be. Praise be to Allah for he is mighty and wise!

Obviously, it's a slow day at Post. Well, kinda. I've just been wandering around in an angsty haze about applying for a job when I (in theory) already have one. But in the end, more money and free tuition has helped me move past the angst. Most of it.

48 Hour Film Project roundup, Baltimore 2006

So I’ve written 2 postings about this past weekend, scrapped them, and started over. I think the best way to do this is to give y’all a blow by blow so you can experience the 48 hours in a condensed posting.

To give you background on the group, the name is The Knights of the B, and the team is comprised of a lot of the team leader/director’s family (think brothers, father, in-laws, etc). It is not my team. My role is just to be a cog in the wheel. The cog named Editor.

Friday- 8pm.
I get a call from the director. “We got Fantasy”. My reply “And you didn’t throw it back?”

8:30pm
I call my sister so we can brainstorm ideas. After that, I periodically check in with the director to relay my ideas.

9:30pm
My sister and I come up with a really good idea. I call the director and tell him. I later find out he didn’t understand the idea so it wasn’t relayed to the brainstorming team very consisely. Oh well.

11:00pm
I get a call from the Producer. Things are going all pell-mell in the writing. They haven’t locked down an idea. No more than 9 people are trying to write this thing. I had no idea it would be like that. None at all!9 writers = recipe for disaster. I pity the producer and head out to buy Wendy’s fries.


SATURDAY
2:00am
I finally get to sleep. Praise be to Allah.

4:00am
My alarm clock goes off. After shaking out of my sleep hazed stupor, I decide taking a shower loses to sleeping 30 more minutes.

4:45am
I drag my ass out of bed, get my stuff together and run out the door to the airport. I do of course stop for the all important iced Dunkin Donuts coffee. And it? Was glorious.

6:00am
Arrive at Manchester. At 7 I get on the plane. I do not sleep on the plane because, unfortunately, I’m wide awake. And no U2 in the cd-man.

8:30am
The Director’s dad meets me at the airport. We go off to what I thought was the first location, and then learn it’s the second location. Say wha?

10:00am
The crew is at the second location (local university) and I help dress the set. I really don’t know why, but filming doesn’t even start until 11am or so. I think actors were late. Basically, I’m sitting on the sidelines watching Men Do Things, like lay dolly track. At some point I take a nap.

11:00am
I’ve put calls into the Producer, who walks off the set, and a writer/associate producer, who doesn’t answer her phone. I also have to track down the lead actor’s phone number because, inexplicably, no one on set has it. How did I become a quasi-producer?

12noon
Sloppy Joes for lunch. My ass is dragging so much I can’t see straight. I think I try to nap again, but nothing happens. I curse thee Allah.

2:00pm
We only have 1 shot in the camera. 0_o
What can you say to that, really? The director, who has been freaking out for awhile, walks around, eyes not really seeing anything. This my friends is what we call Not A Good Sign.

3:00pm
Things are finally rolling. Numerous shots in the camera. I finally get P2 cards. Yay! Then I embarrass myself by thinking they’re not seeing my laptop, when all I had to do was push them in a little more. Duh.

3:10pm
I realize that damn, the notes being taken on set are not helpful. There needs to be a script supervisor, or at the very least SLATES. Slates are an editor’s best friend. And the script supervisor. Slates how I love thee! Let me count the ways.

4:00pm
We break location and I beg off to go to the director’s house to edit. What I do instead is shower, then power nap. I have to confess, I’m an excellent power napper.

5:30pm
I awaken from the divine power nap.

6:00pm
Edit like a maddog and assign scenes to the assistant editor. Except he has FCP 4.5 and it only takes in 1 channel of audio (when there are 4 on all of the clips) so I’ll have to do intense audio mixing anyway. Suck it.

SUNDAY
3:30am
I decide to shut down and catch some sleep, with the intent of waking up at 8am. 10 minutes later the power goes off. I praise be to the sleep deity (it’s not Orpheus, he was mortal, but who the hell is in charge of sleep?) that I got tired and shut everything off.

8:00am
Alarm goes off. I shut it off and shut my eyes again. Motivation has completely left my body. Never deny the narcotic effect of sleep. Or Snoozing.

10:00am
I drag my ass out of bed (couch) and get some coffee. The other editor wakes up. We start hacking away at the edit.

11:00am
I call the composer and ask for the impossible. Occasionally impossibles are delivered by .Mac. God bless the internet.

1:00pm
I suggest to the director that title cards are needed in between scenes since we have not shot our way out of or into scenes.

...

2:00pm
The edit’s coming together. Kind of. The director views parts of scenes and wants to see something happen other than what the writer wanted. Too tired and apathetic to argue otherwise, I do it. In hindsight, I think I should have fought for the writer’s version of the edit.

3:00pm
Still no title cards from the director. I get scans of the storyboards from the AP and send them along to the resident animator. Maybe he can make something happen. I’m glad I insisted they be scanned. Foresight is amazing!

4:00pm
No title cards and no credits. Grr.

5:00pm
Final sound mix is done. Title cards are done. Final credits are done (by someone who said the rendered quicktime would be 4 gigs. EXCUSE ME? And he didn’t know what title safe was. This coming from someone who “works with After FX all the time”. Uh. Yeah.)

5:15pm
I start the downconvert render. In a panic, I don’t think I have time to add any music under the title cards. Not that we had much to add regardless. I make one change in the order of the title cards which the director allows.

6:00pm
Rendering finishes. Downconverting HD to DV on a laptop is not advisable in pressure situations!

6:15pm
I begin cursing the camera that we’re supposed to output to. I restart my machine several times. The computer can’t see the camera or vice versa. I output a data file of the sequence and have the other editor burn a data-dvd since my computer has become ridiculously slow in doing so. I continue to struggle with the camera/computer issue. I trash preferences, switch firewire cables, unplug and replug to refresh the firewire bus. During one of these attempts, the computer thinks I have unplugged the 800 cable, which I have not. Shit hits the fan. I gauk blindly at my computer screen.

6:50pm
The director’s been with us for awhile. He’s annoyed that we can’t print to tape. So am I. But we have the DVD data disc, and that’s as good as it’s going to get. Now, theoretically, it’s not one of the approved formats for submission, but having assembled master screening tapes for DC, I know this will make the editor’s life easier. I push the director to accept the disc. They leave.

7:00pm
I wish I had a beer. Instead I think I showered. I can’t rightly recall at this point!

And that was that. Later on in the evening, the director, his brother and myself talk about the shoot. To describe the pervading feeling as “downtrodden” is the understatement of the century. We feel like we all failed. The only consolation I have is that the director said to me at one point “On Saturday, at 2pm, I was going to pull the plug if you weren’t there” which is a nice little ego boost, however, it made me regret not waking up earlier, fighting for the edits I should have, or getting more involved on set on Saturday. Le sigh.

My boss has gone commando for 3 days

If it was TMI for me, then it's TMI for you.

Moving on, instead of amusing postings, I give you links. yay!

Adobe just announced their student design award winners and here is the Motion Graphics Winner. Behold the power of 3D layers, yo.

I'm behind the times, but if you are too, then it's all good. The budget for The Village was leaked, and it's fun to see where 70 million dollars goes. On a side note, yes, that file extension means it was edited on EP Budgeting, the same software many producing students use. Werd.

This is from Movie Maker magazine, a list which I like, and not just because I like Wim Wenders.

So yeah, hopefully I'll finish the marathon posting of what went down in Balto 48 Hour 06 soon. Hopefully.

Workflow with the HVX-200 and the P2 Card in post

---Editor's note- I wrote up a few postings about my experience doing the Baltimore 48 Hour Film Project but I need to revise them. Deal with techno mumbo jumbo for now----

I know, I know, you’re all jumping out of your seats with the same question- How does one work with this media in post? Thankfully, I have some answers. (Disclaimer- I am not an expert, so don’t blame me if things don’t work out for you using my methodology. I’ve only done this once. Hopefully many more however. Anyway.)

So you’re about to work on a shoot with these cards. Your presence on set has been requested, something to which you’re not used to. Editor? On set? Is hell experiencing a cold front? No, but you’ve got the equipment, or will soon, to handle the media that comes from the camera’s cards. Being on set also gives you an advantage- if the cards come to you fast enough, and this stuff is storyboarded out enough, you might potentially catch errors the script supervisor or director don’t catch and can get them to shoot another take. Or get more pickups. Or invite the DP over to beam in the bask of his lovely footage from his lovely camera.

Right, anyway, so what do you do? Follow some steps here, and you should be alright.

1- Have the latest OS update on your machine.
2- Have the latest version of Quicktime on your machine.
3- Probably the most important- have the latest version of Final Cut on your machine. Right now it’s 5.1.1.
4- Download the P2 driver from Panasonic’s website and install on your machine.
5- If you will be working on anything other than a PowerBook, get yourself a card adapter.

Now that your machine is taken care of, time to make sure you have 2 external drives. Why 2? Here’s where listening to the workflow method I’m about to lay down here is very fucking important.

Have a clean drive handy. Make a bunch of folders labelled P2Card 1, P2Card 2, and so on.

When you slap the card into your laptop, you care going to copy the contents of the card (that’s everything on the card, don’t forget that lastclip.txt or you will be screwed for the most part) over to the external hard drive with the folders you’ve pre-made. Once copied, kick out the card. It’s easier for the DP or Camera Operator to delete the cards in camera.

Now, you’ve got the card contents on 1 external drive. Hook up the second external drive. Set your capture scratch to the second drive. Open up FCP and choose File/Import/P2 card and navigate to the P2Card media you’ve just copied over. Import all the shots you want. Final Cut Pro is transcoding the files from the P2 card to quicktimes (they’re MXF files before that). The first hard drive acts as your “tape” and the second hard drive is the one you edit from. This way, in theory, your “tape” is safe in case the other drive dies or something. And if you really wanted to be safe, you would burn DVD backups of the media on another computer.

Check out Creative Cow for really good support and information on the camera, and there’s a tutorial you should check out which is basically what I’ve just typed out. In the link. So don't be lazy.

The Post Girl is also insane

Because on Saturday, I will fly to Baltimore to edit my friend's 48 Hour Film Project entry in the Balto '06 festival. Yes, Portland (well, Manchester, NH) to Baltimore and then back on Monday. Crazy talk, I know! But it shall be fun. Or so I tell myself.

Look forward to reports on the Panasonic HVX-200 with the P2 cards. And possibly more tips. I shall look forward to possible sleep. On the plane ride home of course.

*does her best not to jinx a goddamn thing with those lovely but potentially evil cameras*

The Post Girl is rather boring

Yeah, nothing going on of note up here. Some sun, some rain, some editing. And ze editing is le boring.

In other news, the remote control for my TV has vanished in the VORTEX OF DOOM. I was sitting on my couch the other night, esconced in some website or another, and I heard the remote control fall off the couch. I didn't turn to pick it up because why? I didn't need it then. Let LAO drone on in the background I figured. So perhaps 10 minutes later I turn around to pick up the remote. It's not on the ground. I furrow my brow and figure it must be under the couch. So I get down on my knees and look. No remote. I look under the chair. No remote. I survey the entire floor. No remote. Now I'm confused as hell. I heard it drop. I didn't move from the couch. And yet it's not where I heard it drop. WTF world? I tear apart the couch. No remote. I shine a flashlight under the couch, tables, chair. No remote. I look BEHIND the couch, where laws of physics deem that it could not possibly be, and yet I'm starting to think the laws of physics have ceased to exist, so shit, it's possible, and guess what? NO REMOTE.

I would like to point out that was Friday. I lost the remote Friday. And it? Is now Thursday.

Also, my new box of trashbags is missing. Now THAT is beyond any explanation I can offer.

Round 5- Surviving Post in the 48HFP

Uh huh. So you've shot tapes, maybe you've run tapes over to your editor or assistant. What now?

SURVIVING THE 48HFP- IT ALL COMES DOWN TO POST
Ok, I'm biased, but we all know it comes together in the editing room.

- Make sure your editor is only editing and doing nothing else. Alternatively, if your editor must do something else (not that I’m saying I know anything about this…), make sure you have an assistant editor who can digitize while the editor is doing their other job.

-Have your editing team make up a schedule. It’s generally ideal to have everything digitized into your system before midnight. A rough cut by 6am. And polish the cut before you hand it in. Also having more editors than you think can be good (one can work on graphics, another on spiffy end credits, another on helping you edit a scene when the shit hits the fan and you won’t finish on time).

- If you have more than 1 editor, 1 fx person, 1 music person, etc, consider having a Post Production Supervisor. If you have an extra producer, AP, whatever, have them be the line of communication with your post team. They can keep an eye on the clock and push people for what’s needed rather than putting that solely on the editor’s shoulders.

- If your post team can be by themselves, make sure it happens. When you have less than 24 hours to put this whole she-bang together, nerves really start to fry. Having a quiet post environment helps keep the calm people. Be zen, be very zen.

-Figure out who’s making the tape drop (or tapes, remember, you are allowed to drop off 2 tapes and you should). He who drives the tape should know the city fairly well. You may be coming down to the line on that.

- I said this before and I’ll say it again. DO NOT HAND IN A DVD. DVD=COMPRESSION=BAD PROJECTION IN THE THEATER. Come on now people, don’t be a dunderhead. Submit a mini-dv.

-No theater can really project HD. Deal with it. Your project has to be submitted on a mini-dv readable by the most common mini-dv decks out there (most likely) so don’t get all fancy-pants on the 48HFP people. If your tape cannot be read, has a glitch, etc, you will be called to submit another. However, you are then considered “late”. And late sucks.

-If you are going to be late, be late. Don’t be late and be in car accident too. It’s a film festival. It’s not the end all and see all of life. You’ll get it on time next year, right?

Round 4- Surviving the 48HFP, during the madness

So, you have your genre, prop and line of dialogue. You're a little shell-shocked, pissed, overjoyed and heading back to your team. Here are some things to keep in mind during production:

SURVIVING YOUR TEAM'S PRODUCTION- DURING THE MADNESS

- Make sure the producer and the director read the script after it’s finished and before everyone goes to sleep. Get the final script written before people sleep. Even if you’re up to 5am. I am not kidding.

- Don’t be superman. Try not to be doing something every day of the project. It can be done, but it’s not a pretty picture.

- Don’t change location more than 3 times if possible. Every location change ends up losing you 1.5 hours of time, usually more. And you eventually want to be done shooting before Sunday hits.

- Schedule lunch breaks. A fed cast and crew is a happy crew.

- PAs are made to get coffee. Coffee keeps you moving. Or very jittery. But shaky-cam is in, right?

- This is just me, but, trust your sound guy only if you trust him with your life. Bad audio, on this short of a shoot, is nearly impossible to fix.

- On that topic, record room tone, nat sound, ambient sound, or whatever else you would like to call it. Just do it. Your editor will love you. At least 10 seconds if inside, at least a minute if outside.

- Consider having your actors do wild lines after any scene in a quiet place. Having ADR as an option is always nice.

- Did you remember to get those batteries as noted in Before the Madness?

- Be prepared for anything. Be zen.

- Ask for anything you want. You’d be surprised what people are willing to do/give/whatever. Now get your mind out of the gutter :P

- Before breaking a location, ask yourself if you’ve gotten a way to get into the scene and to get out of the scene. If not, SHOOT IT. Screw the production schedule.

Round 3- Surviving the 48HFP, during the madness

So, you have your genre, prop and line of dialogue. You're a little shell-shocked, pissed, overjoyed and heading back to your team. Here are some things to keep in mind during production:

SURVIVING YOUR TEAM'S PRODUCTION- DURING THE MADNESS

- Make sure the producer and the director read the script after it’s finished and before everyone goes to sleep. Get the final script written before people sleep. Even if you’re up to 5am. I am not kidding.

- Don’t be superman. Try not to be doing something every day of the project. It can be done, but it’s not a pretty picture.

- Don’t change location more than 3 times if possible. Every location change ends up losing you 1.5 hours of time, usually more. And you eventually want to be done shooting before Sunday hits.

- Schedule lunch breaks. A fed cast and crew is a happy crew.

- PAs are made to get coffee. Coffee keeps you moving. Or very jittery. But shaky-cam is in, right?

- This is just me, but, trust your sound guy only if you trust him with your life. Bad audio, on this short of a shoot, is nearly impossible to fix.

- On that topic, record room tone, nat sound, ambient sound, or whatever else you would like to call it. Just do it. Your editor will love you. At least 10 seconds if inside, at least a minute if outside.

- Consider having your actors do wild lines after any scene in a quiet place. Having ADR as an option is always nice.

- Did you remember to get those batteries as noted in Before the Madness?

- Be prepared for anything. Be zen.

- Ask for anything you want. You’d be surprised what people are willing to do/give/whatever. Now get your mind out of the gutter :P

- Before breaking a location, ask yourself if you’ve gotten a way to get into the scene and to get out of the scene. If not, SHOOT IT. Screw the production schedule.

Round 2- General Tips for succeeding in the 48HFP (before the game begins)

Second post in a continuing series-

GENERAL TIPS FOR SUCCEEDING WITH YOUR TEAM before the madness begins:
- Pre-production is KEY. You can never have too many locations or music pieces released. Don’t be afraid of asking the impossible. People have shot in Reagan International Airport and Raven Stadium without having amazing connections. Be nice, be persistent and be upfront (as in you have no money, so don’t even ask).

- If you have CDs from small label artists, have you thought about finding a musician who could score the piece for you? Who cares if you don’t have recording equipment for stuff like that, you have a boom mic and a video camera don’t you? Record onto that! Music scored for your particular film adds SO much to the film it’s not funny. Really.

- Try to work with people who have no egos.

- Try to work with no more than 10ish crew members. More will drive you crazy and becomes a logistical nightmare (well, unless you’re only shooting at one location).

- You can’t have too much equipment. Stuff breaks. Shit happens.

- You can’t have enough batteries. Of all kinds. Especially those stupid 9 volt ones.

- Go through the genres. Decide which ones make you shake like a leaf. Decide on your genre accepting process. (You will draw a genre out of hat and then be given opportunity to consult with your team, after which you can keep your genre and leave OR take the evil wild card.)

- Test your editing system and your output method. Your output method SHOULD NOT BE DVD. Give them a tape. You’re allowed to hand in 2 tapes. It’s actually a good idea to do so in case something is screwed up on one of them.

- Have PAs with cars. PAs with cars are your HEROES.

The unbearable evilness of Canon

Repeat with me. HDV is Evil and Canon is it's father.

I had an encounter with the Canon XL HD1 tonight. The camera is on loan to us for the summer because Canon is generous and Panasonic is not. We had the Pana HDVX100 for about a week, and it was sweet. Those P2 cards are a pleasure to work with. We actually had a number of HDV cameras- the Sony, the JVC, the Pana, and the Canon (all the under 10 grand cameras). The blacks on all of them are incredibly noisy. We shot on each camera and tested the footage in FCP. No problems. Until I went to capture stuff from the Canon tonight.

One of the other staff editors had captured a tape earlier in the day. When he went back to look at the footage, there was a significant drift in the audio. Like, insane type drift. The problem was it played back fine in the camera. So wtf was the problem? Had to be in the capture. So I used the power of TEH INTERWEB and found out what the problem was. Here's my e-mail to the other editors:

----
Right. So the reason we can't capture that crazy footage is because it was recorded in 24F, a crack-ass proprietary format Canon created and provides no support for. If you record in anything BUT 24F on that camera, Final Cut Pro has much love for you. Otherwise, eh, fagheddaboutit. Apparently the folks at Apple demoed a patch for this aggravating problem at NAB, but yeah, it ain't available yet. Lovely.

But some folks have decided this is a money making opportunity for them- check out their solution at http://www.hdvxdv.com/. It's only $80! What a deal! I actually found out about this on Apple's support forum (don't fall off your chair) and this is the easiest work around out there, unless we have a fancy pants Kona card I don't know about. And even then, the work around with Kona is a PITA.

Ergo, I've installed a demo on Vidor and Hitchcock. You first must import the footage into the program, then have the program transcode it. DVCPro HD is recommended. You can view test footage I tried out on Vidor. It works like a charm and comes in at a whooping 3/4th a gig for 1 minute of footage. And that tape is 40 minutes or so. Yeah. But no audio lag. Feel the love.

The demo puts a nice sparkly watermark over the footage, but at least you can fiddle around with it. I did not take more than 5 minutes into the machine, but at least we know it works. If Lightener worked in this assinine format, he must've had this application on a machine available. Otherwise, I've no idea how he worked with it. FWIW, the transcoding takes some time. I'd recommend setting something like this up overnight after it captured, and making sure we had a helluva lotta free space on a drive.

More reading on the matter for your pleasure:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1789021�
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2138322�
----

What kind of company creates a format that no one can edit with? No program out there can deal with the 24F format. Seriously. WTF? Even Panasonic worked with FCP to deal with the P2 cards.

OH THE INSANITY!

Strobe: The Anti-Cool effect

I'm the first one to admit it- the more you design/edit/whatever, you become attached to certain effects. Eventually they meld into your style. Occasionally you latch on to an effect that is beyond cheesy, but you're attracted to anyway. Whatev, if you can make it work sista, more power to you! And then there are the non-designers, editors, who latch onto an effect because, well, they actually have no good reasons.

There's one such person here up in Maine. He loves *drumroll please* the strobe effect in Final Cut Pro. The strobe effect has it's uses. When used subtley, it can give a slightly filmic look to video. When used non-subtley, it makes the audio appear out of sync with the video, and therefore stupid. Personally, I would only use this on video to specifically make it look like film for a specific reason (archival footage, a flashback that's supposed to be aged 8mm film or something like that) and never ever ever on a corporate video or documentary. If you want it to look like film, shoot film. If you can't shoot film, shoot 24p. But if you shoot 29.97, and light the video brilliantly, and then want to take away that brilliance by using a stupid filter because "everyone uses that filter" and by everyone, you mean hacks like you, well then, I call you what you are. A wanker.

Ok, I wanted to call him a wanker, but I couldn't really do that, but I told him in front of his entire class, a few times, that the strobe filter was STUPID and that people came up to me when the last piece his class did was shown (with ugly strobe all over it) and asked me what was wrong with the piece. Ignoring the fact no one did this outside of Post, shit, it still looked stupid, especially stupid projected onto a LARGE SCREEN. People who weren't in post came up to me and said "strobe filter, eh?"

If you can tell what the filter is (and it's a cheesy filter), but can finesse it so it's not so obviously *that* filter, rock on. If OTHER PEOPLE can figure it out, you're a hack.

I hate working for hacks.

I gape, therefore I am

Gape- to goggle: look with amazement; look stupidly

That my friends, was me last Friday night. Let me tell you the story!

Every Friday night here up in the ME, Post assembles the end of the week show for the video classes. They hand in final projects by 4pm (which we try and color correct and audio mix before that time) and then we assemble amusing slates for the classes with appropriately saucy music, slam their pieces into the timeline, then push that baby out to tape. Easy enough, but some shows push an hour or more, so if anything screws up, things get a little tense. Also? No one hands in anything on time. Apparently, deadlines mean nothing in the film and video world.

(A side note- there are children upstairs for reasons I cannot explain, and they're doing their best to punch a hole in my ceiling. WTF? I want to blog and watch poker in peace!)

So anyway, I'm assembling the show on one of our house G5s. On the internal, partitioned drive. On a computer named Oliver Stone. I later learn Oliver is a right bastard for all his brilliance during Natural Born Killers, and he acts retardedly when called upon to do things of Minor Importance. Right. Anyway, while printing the show to tape, a frame drops, so I restart the print. It happens again. I swear. I start again. And again. Finally FCP crashes and I am informed of Oliver's petulance. I've been running the show from a backup from the Autosave Vault for awhile, so I decide to fish out the project I need and relabel it. I then drag it over to the partitioned drive and open up FCP. Hmm, all my media is missing. I stare at the screen for a moment and flip the finder on and browse the media drive.

My media folder is gone.

Let me repeat that. My. Media. Folder. IS GONE.

At that point I gape at the computer for a solid 30 seconds. I look at the FCP project file. I believe the name was the same as the media folder. But when I dropped it from the Autosave Vault over to the partioned drive, Mas OSX did not ask me if I wanted to replace it. (And if it did, I certainly didn't pay attention. My catatonic state could've wiped it from my memory too.) Fuck you Mac OS and Fuck Me. So the show that needs to go to tape soon (it's now 7pm and the show starts at 8 and oh yeah, the show is over an hour tonight) has suddenly disappeared.

Fuck me.

One of the other editors, being of sound mind and body, starts grabbing drives and reassembling the show on a computer not named Oliver Stone. I eventually snap out of my reaction to this horrible mistake I have made and help him with the order of the show and grab files from other computers. The show then goes off to tape.

Later that night I get sick off the food I ate at dinner. Karma? Maybe.

In reflection over this major gaff, I remember watching a friend of mine edit, and he put .whatever tags on all his file names. He didn't like that the MacOS didn't put them on. I thought this was a weird little thing to do, albeit with merit, but I had never done that (unless I needed to send a file to a PC computer). But, I have Learned! I name files with extensions now! Most of the time that is ;)