Alright, I think it’s been at least a year since my last post. I never intended to let this blog die, and I actually quite enjoyed writing my thoughts. So what happened?
The Mac Pro happened. I had been editing on a G4 and in my free time whilst rendering small things I’d write posts. Generally I’d slowly write a post as the day progressed and then post it when I was done. Gave me something to do which wasn’t being bored on the internet and stooping to the level of playing inane FaceBook games for hours on end.
Anyways, long story short, overheating killed yet another HDD in my poor old MDD and I knew it was time to move on. Luckily I was able to retrieve all my data, though part of it was slow like the platter was warped and either hard to read or physically impeding the movement of the read head. It only happened on one particular ’section’ of data too. Anyways, G4 DP MDD went away and was replaced with a shiny Mac Pro DP dual-core 2.66GHz. The problem herein was that this new machine with its many cores and significantly faster speed meant that small renders went from minutes to seconds. MPEG2 CBR at 1:1 became MPEG2 VBR at 1.5:1. Everything was so much faster I found that I worked more, and worked faster.
However, with great power comes great responsibility, and as my skill set expanded so did the demands of my employer. Jobs became longer and more complex, but the pay wasn’t budging. So January came around, after 12 months of 7-day a week working and my sanity hanging by a thread I quit working for that particular employer.
Armed with only the small list of contacts I had I set myself up to brave the world on my own, which I’ve been doing since January. Freelancing, despite the pitfalls and difficulties, has proven quite a pleasant way to work.
So now I return to this blog, posting in this new thing I have called ‘free time’ and trying to keep up with the general theme of where I left off. Shortly I’ll be changing my URL and all those bits to something a bit more coherent and easier to give over the phone. I’ve learned a lot over this last year, including ‘how to charge clients ACTUAL money’, ‘tape sucks’, ‘Blu-Ray is laggy’ and so on. Nothing ground breaking.
Until next time – awa!
