I guess I'm going to have to explain that huh?

15 years ago I was a part time temporary contractor at a local PBS station in my home town. Clyde was the Senior editor at that facility and I had been hired to help Visa create some tape for something and we had just bought a new piece of gear and I was WAY TO EXCITED TO USE IT.

The gear was an Abekas A53-D and in it's day it was one bad ass DVE. For you younger editors out there DVE stands for, or should I say, "STOOD" for Digital Video Effects. Back in the day, when you wanted to move something around on the screen you had to put it in the DVE and position it that way.

Well I had been experimenting with shadow techniques and had been playing with this DVE and I wanted to make the Visa logo fly off the screen with a nice soft drop shadow. It was going to take 2 passes because , well, that's the way you did things back then and Clydes 1" A/B Roll edit system had no way of triggering the DVE.

Guess what? I ended up making a complete fool out of myself. Those of you old enough to know why will understand.

The beauty of technology is that those of you who aren't old enough to understand DON'T HAVE TO.

I'm writing this article at 36,000 feet on my way to a gig in Amsterdam on my PowerBook that is more powerful than the Abekas A53-D, Clyde's edit controller, the 3 1" VTR's (that were EACH the size of a refrigerator) and basically everything else in that whole facility... combined.

Today I'm travelling with a 1GHz PowerBook Titanium that burns DVDs and this isn't even the most advanced laptop that Apple is selling. I have a very cool new IBM travelstar 2.5" hard drive in a portable enclosure that is bus powered so you don't have to plug it in seperately. The thing spins at 7200 RPM and the enclosure has an Oxford 911 bridge to improve transfer rates of large files.

So basically I have a full blown edit suite sitting here in the 22" that Unted has determined that a human can sit in for 11 hour straight.

The only draw back? Power driain is fairly significant whil you are powering that additional drive spinning so fast. Realistically you only get about an hour and a half from the "5 hour" battery.

Now if we could only convince United to put power back here in the cheap seats where I can affor to sit I could be getting some REAL work done.

Chris Fenwick
Broadcast Business Graphics
Director/Editor
www.chrisfenwick.com