My First “Oh, $h!t” Moment
A few weeks back, my former colleague, Chad Pittman, made the comment that he was wondering when I would have my first “Oh, $h!t” moment. Initially, I laughed it off.
He’s a two-time US Army combat veteran who’s seen his share of war and knows what it is like when reality smacks you in the head that’s filled with fancy, elegant plans. Suddenly, his musings became real.
Last night was that first “Oh, $h!t” moment for me. I had rough cut the first six interviews and began to arrange a plan for the first episode. Then, I found out my MacBook Air was overmatched by the task of rendering them.
I know from previous experience how rough of sledding post-production could be. But I didn’t think to consider how well my laptop could handle rendering 30 minutes of high-def video. Turns out loading three hours of 4k video files onto a taxed hard drive isn’t a good idea.
Mind you, I found this out around midnight, 2am, 3am, 5am, and 6am as I napped while my laptop was rendering (and mostly failing/rebooting) these videos. By morning, I had two of the six rough cuts uploaded and one stuck at 95% processed on YouTube.
Because I’m already 1/3 of the way thru my production work week, I began to spiral into a late night doom loop. My body and mind froze on the looming July 15 IRS tax filing deadline, the need to book interviews for my eastward journey, and all the decisions to be made for what to do when I arrive in Atlanta.
I woke around 7:45am and got myself square with my morning routine of stretching/Tai Chi/yoga/core exercises. Clearing my mind allowed me to realize the need to delete the 4k video files and pare down to the bare essentials.
Instead of rendering and sharing directly to YouTube, I’m rendering to the hard drive and then loading to YouTube. That way, I can at least get the rough cut videos rendered without losing them if the upload fails.
In about an hour, I have a whiteboard session with my partners at VidLoft to map out the first episode and the basic structure of these episodes. That’ll help me select and clip footage for the second and third episodes quicker (that’s the hope).
This doesn’t make for great social media posts. So I’ll just walk old town Pasco and take photos of the bright colors. Of course, I’ll capture pictures of tumbleweeds to satiate those of you asking where all the tumbleweeds I somehow promised to deliver. Found a bunch in their own marina slip.
What part of your work is necessary but non-glamourous?
