Digitizer's Job

Happy Easter!

First I want to congratulate all my friends who participated in Campus Movie Fest this year at Indiana University. I've been watching all your films and they always blow me away. I wish I could have been there to see them all on the big screen, as well as seeing my best friend Kathryn Begle host the show! All of you are so creative and talented, I know you will go on to do big things.

I love hearing about people landing internships here in LA for the summer! Congratulations to you all as well. I look forward to seeing more Hoosiers in Hollywood!! =)

As for you students graduating in less than a month, (AHHH! I know right? Crazy.) don't think you need to have everything figured out before that graduation date. YOU DON'T! Yes it is scary. Yes it is stressful, but what makes you think you'll have life figured out by the age of 22? Breath. It'll all work out. I've been talking to people about the transition from graduating to moving out here. I won't say it is easy, because it is not. It is very scary and stressful, but if I can do it...you can too. I promise.

I've also been dealing with my own stresses at work lately. As a digitizer, I work on all the shows of the entire company. If we have 5 shows in production, then I get shipments of XDCAM discs for 5 different shows. Recently I have been the ONLY digitizer for the company, which is a lot of work for only one person. One day my boss sent me home in the morning when I was sick. I think that's when it hit people, that I'm the only person that knows how to do my job, and without me they don't have anything to work on. One co-worker was rushing out of my work room then stopped and said, "You know you are the heart of this company, right? Without you the company stands still." Lots of pressure for one person, but I like it at the same time.

So, in order to stay on top of things I've been working 6 days a week. Let me give you a perspective of what I dealt with this past week. Before Wednesday I got 15 boxes of tapes (XDCAM discs, we still call them tapes). One box of tapes holds around 50 tapes. So after doing the math I got around 750 tapes just this week. I was swimming in tapes, literally.

A received my first compliment recently from an Editor who was being an Assistant Editor for The Real World for a few weeks. He told me, "Ashley, you are good at what you do. Very soon an AE will move up to Editor and then you will be bumped up to being an Assistant Editor. You can quickly see the people you can count on and put the pressure on. So keep up the good work." It made my day. You aren't given many compliments in this industry. Usually silence is golden. If you hear nothing back, you must have done your job right. When I first started being a digitizer I was not good. I made many mistakes and didn't understand how to do many things. So in the past 5 months I've been trying to prove myself. I think I'm finally getting there.

Keep your goals high and your head higher.

DIY IKEA Side Table Makeover

Haven't really had much to blog about the past few months. Just recently, work has become very busy once shows have gone into production. My friend Kevin Marco was just promoted from digitizer to an assistant editor which bumped me up to working his day shift. I now work 9am-6pm! I HAVE FRIDAY NIGHTS AGAIN! (First time since before September 2011). I'm still trying to get use to the different sleeping pattern. It's been a exhausting couple of weeks.

Some of you (probably girls) have heard of the website called, Pinterest. Some people, especially guys, do not understand the point of it. So! Let me explain. The website is dedicated to 'pinning' your interests. Get it? Pinterest! (So clever, right?) It is a website full of pictures put into categories from food, apparel, to photography, to home decor. EVERYTHING! I have recently become obsessed with this site because it really inspires me. I find inspiration for outfits, decorating, to baking delicious treats! Without Pinterest I would have never thought of baking my Rudolph cookies during Christmas or my peanut butter dove heart cookies for Valentines Day.

The home decor section gives me really great ideas when decorating or renovating furniture. (You can also see another one of my Pinterest inspired projects in the background that involved melting crayons onto a canvas to create a cool effect). I recently bought a side table from IKEA and decided to make it my own. I went to Lowes and matched a pretty blue color to the picture hanging above my bed. I had to buy sand paper, primer, paint, paint brushes/rollers, a drop cloth and finisher spray. It was a long process, but it turned out great! I knew I needed a cool lamp to put on my table so I started searching online. I went to every store I could think of and came to the conclusion: lamps are wicked expensive. Seriously! Luckily, I went to Pier 1 Imports and found an awesome lamp on sale for like $30. I love it. Pier 1 became my new favorite store that day. (Sorry IKEA). They had so many pretty things. I ended up buying 2 pillows along with my lamp. Their entire pillow section is amazing. I want them all.

I finally finished the table yesterday when I went to Anthropologie and bought cute nobs for the drawers. They had so many cute ones to choose from! It's an expensive store, but they have really pretty cups and bowls for decoration, kitchen ware, and for the bathroom. I wanted everything!

So, I highly recommend Pinterest. I promise you'll be inspired and motivated to create something awesome. Be sure to find me and follow my pins!

From Final Cut to Avid

Hello Kids!

Hope you had a great Holiday Season. I was fortunate enough to fly home Dec 20 until Jan 2nd to visit family and friends for Christmas. Sadly, my sister was sick the entire duration I was home and gave me a cold as well. So I arrived back with a nasty cold... It was snowing as my dad drove me to the airport early in the morning on January 2nd and I arrived in Los Angeles to 85 degree weather. It was incredibly warm. Definitely great to come back to!

When I look back to the year 2011...it was a BIG year for me. I dealt with the most stressful semester of my life, graduated from college, landed my internship, moved to LA, started a new life, got my first real job in the industry AND got promoted once! I say it was a great year. I'm looking forward to 2012!

There are big things happening at Bunim/Murray Productions starting year this year. As most of you know, the professional entertainment industry is pretty upset with Apple for releasing Final Cup Pro X which replaces Final Cut Pro 7. They no longer sell or provide services for FCP 7 which forced my boss, Mark Raudonis, to make a decision on what BMP should do. FCP X is designed for the consumer "amateur" editors which is a MUCH LARGER market. Apple would rather make more money selling to the normal consumer than help lead the way in the professional editing market. SO! Mark has decided to switch to Avid Media Composer 6.

As you can see the editing interface is different. (You can change the interface colors to whatever your heart desires in the AVID interface). The way of editing on these programs are different as well, but easy to adjust. The shortcuts or keystrokes are the main difference between the two. My way of doing my job as a Digitizer will change completely when we switch over to AVID. In the next few weeks I will be re-training and learning how to do everything I do now, but ALL in the AVID. Unlike FCP, I will digitize, and uprez footage in AVID. FCP does not have this ability. I always had to import with XDCAM transfer and then use Compressor to put it in offline format (low rez quality). This all may sound like boring technical stuff for me, but many of us are worried about the switch slowing down Post Production until everyone is adjusted to AVID after a few months.

For those of you film nerds that would be interested in reading some articles about Bunim/Murray Production's switch over to AVID here are 2 links:
We were featured on AVID's website (My boss is quoted): http://www.avid.com/US/press-room/Bunim-Murray-Selects-Avid
My boss did another article (Goofy Pictures included): http://magazine.creativecow.net/article/real-world-editing