PVC: Please label tapes and disks: An open letter to DPs, camera ops, DITs
By S Simmons. Filed in Editing, filmmaking, The Editblog on PVC |
If you have been an editor for hire for any real period of time then I bet you have been handed a stack of videotapes or a hard drive in a box (or maybe a grocery sack) with no labels, no notes and no identifying factors whatsoever as to the format, resolution or frame rate of the source footage. It can be a very frustrating experience. I recently posted an An open letter to DPs, camera ops, DITs – Please label tapes and disks over at the Editblog on PVC. Let’s hope it might help out at least one job somewhere in the world!
Saturday, June 27th 2009 at 1:06 pm
I must confess that there have been times where I did not label the tape – but that was only in cases where there was only a single tape, and I had checked with the reporter who needed to catch a plane.
When sending a harddisk, I always include a readme.txt which gives a description of the content.
What I would love occasionally is to get feedback from editors, as to what they think of the the footage. And more importantly, how we as cameramen could make your job as editor easier.
In a perfect world, the editor would get to talk to the cameramen before starting the edit, so that the cameraman could brief him/her as to what is on the tape, what was important to the cameramen, etc. Heck, that’s why I love working with my wife as an editor
Tuesday, June 30th 2009 at 1:37 am
Thumbs down for all the recent posts that require clicking through from the RSS feed to read. Even more so when the article is only one sentence longer than the summary.
Tuesday, June 30th 2009 at 12:19 pm
My motto: an unlabeled tape is a blank tape.
Tuesday, June 30th 2009 at 7:52 pm
Hmm…. sorry about that Ben. I checked the setting for that and it is set to show the whole post and not a summary. Hopefully that will be fixed in the new WordPress update.
Thursday, July 2nd 2009 at 10:43 pm
Oh god, I really need to do this immediately or before filming.. I found myself putting this step off and winding up with a stack of unlabeled tapes!! and I mean.. A STACK!!
http://www.twitpic.com/6ps3w
Friday, July 3rd 2009 at 5:22 am
Holy moly … that’s a pile ‘o tapes!