Editing video is a fickle thing.

Sure you could resort to Windows Movie Maker (or iMovie on a mac), but the fact of the matter is, if you want any serious control over what you’re doing you’re fairly limited to what you can use – essentially this boils down to about a half dozen different programs, the main ones being the names that are frequently dropped in film circles: Final Cut, Adobe Premiere, Avid, Sony Vegas… there are others of course, but these are merely the ones I have experience with.

And it’s actually kinda funny how similar they are as they struggle for dominance in the industry.

Software itself aside, when I first upgraded my gear to HD back in June (just before NXNE 2011) I was fairly certain it was for the best not only for video quality, but also for editing. I’d been noticing issues with tape ingestion off my Canon XL-1 that I’d never had to deal with back in university when I was shooting on a Panasonic HVX-200 – this new all-digital Sony NEX-VG10 would be recording on SD Memory cards – mind you, my after-the-fact research suggests this is because I never re-used the same DV tape 60 times back in university…. something The Indie Machine quickly helped escalate during a music festival.

What I didn’t anticipate however was my aging computer’s ability to process HD video with 2GB of RAM – I’d always been told more RAM is better, but never truly realized how much was needed until I tried to edit that first HD video and watched my computer freeze up as it tried to buffer the initial preview. With the recent 16GB RAM upgrade however, things now seem to be chugging along smoothly.

But I’m getting off track.

Jack and I met up to work on the preliminary edit of Miss Familiar this week – everything seems to have come together really well – the shots look sharp thus far, though we’ve noticed a couple spots where we might have to duck out and shoot some pickup closeups for sequence filler as some of the cuts run by a little quickly in playback: something we hadn’t anticipated in the initial scripting and shot-listing.

That said, the preliminary edit is cut – visually… I still need to sync up all the camera audio with the stuff we were grabbing off my H4N on the end of a boom pole. After that, we’ll still need to meet up to shoot the pre-opening credit bar sequence (about 10 shots) to help set the tone for the short…. and to make sure that due to a vomit sequence, Jack’s character doesn’t come as a cancer patient… or bulimic.