Be Like Abe

Planet Bike: Guadalajara, Spain

When asked his methodology, Abraham Lincoln was once quoted as saying “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”

Making a slight editing adjustment, swapping the metaphorical axe as a symbol of strength, one could easily slide the idea of preparedness into the quote and come away with just as good an aphorism. Something I am sure would please Abe. All this swapping, sliding and sharpening comes as a result of my head-first dive into the production of Video II. Whose working title is officially Planet Bike.

Anyone who has dealt with the filing of media, be it photography, music catalogues, sound files, baseball cards, books, bills, recipe cards, more bills, tax receipts or anything needing a name, place and a number, knows of the potential nightmare lurking in the shadows. That devil lies in the detail. In my particular case (nightmare) it is in video files. At the end of yesterday’s effort I counted my exterior hard drive count to be 31, or around 25TB, roughly the same amount of video uploaded to YouTube every day. That is a lot of video to scan looking for a single clip.

Trying to play the 80/20 rule on (non-linear) video production, get 80% of the work done first and then return to sweeten the 20%, the theme, or story, I chose for the important second video in what I hope to be a regular monthly event, revolves around the international events I have filmed outside the US. I guess I could call it Over the Wall (and far away).

Accordingly, I need to find the footage, re-digitize, store and assemble on the time line. This is the bulk of the 80%. It also means that I must jump back and forth from the latest versions of a rapidly changing technology all the way back - yesterday’s time travel took us back 12 years, to the days when digital video was in its adolescence. I will summarize all this by saying that things have changed. I spent a ridiculous amount of time finding the cables, connectors, external hard drives, cassettes, devices and tapes necessary to convert to modern file formats. This creates tension. I am easily frustrated if I have to spend an hour finding a clip from an event shot during the Bush administration, simply for the reason that I failed to properly label it at download. True, you might respond, this is due to the fact that at that time I was more interested in doing whatever I could to tell the public that Rumsfeld, Cheney and even Powell were lying through their respective dentures about WMD, than about the detailed and proper labeling of video footage from an Ironman in the Canary Islands. So yes, I plead guilty with an explanation that has since been validated by history.

The moral to this story, not the one about the war crimes committed by the cabal of sycophants, the effects of whose treasonous felonies continue to this day, but the video storage and filing is this:

Take the necessary time to properly identify and label, with as much detail as possible, your media as it is stored. Spend that 80% in this area and I guarantee that when you need quick access to a specific shot, event, location, interview or person, you won’t have to invade a foreign country under false pretense, to do so. Keep your hands blood-free and your conscience clean. This will help you sleep as much as six hours of chopping a tree with (even a razor sharp) axe.

Which may be capsulized by paraphrasing that lying bastard Rumsfeld, “We know what we know (there is big oil money to be made) and we know what we don’t know (how to buffalo the country to thinking it is for democracy),” into something like “If we only know what we are seeking, by the time we find it, we might have forgotten why we sought it in the first place.”

Label your media. And don’t lie. Be like Abe.