Kiss My Knits!

My husband and I have been trying to de-clutter our lives, and one way we’re doing this is by getting rid of video tapes. However, some tapes we don’t want to get rid of, such as my old resume reels. Unfortunately, my master tapes are on MII, a format that never really came into its own in commercial use. It’s like the Beta of TV stations. Which is ironic, because Beta was industry standard when I was there. Also like Beta, MII was superior to the format which did come into wide use. Blu-Ray, pay attention! Never neglect marketing!

We were moving to a digital playback system when I left in ’99. I didn’t bother to put my stuff on a more easily accessible format because it never in a million years occurred to me that I wouldn’t be returning. It was simply an impossibility. Funny where life takes you, eh?

However, I did occasionally dup some stuff to VHS to bring home and review, and I did have my friend and former boss dub a few things to a tape for me after I left. Nice of him to do. So now, I’ve dumped a lot of my output onto the hard drive of our spiffy new recorder and made one master DVD. I’ll be making another copy for safekeeping.

From college, it’s got the crappy tape transfer of the B&W student film I edited, plus the Gunsmoke editing project every film student has had to do since the 50’s, plus a weird student video. Weird student videos are mandatory in college.

Professionally, there’s my intern work at WSOC-TV, and the stuff I did after I got hired as a producer there (hello, salary!). It’s got my editing from NBC News Channel, when I was freelancing overnights. It’s got the early stuff I did for WJZY, and my Hawaii 5-0 spot that got an Addy. There are a few later spots done after the advent of Photoshop and AfterEffects, when I could actually, you know, ADD GRAPHICS to my spots. I look at most of my stuff now and think “man, that would be so much better with graphics” but you can only do what you have the tools to do.

There are also a few production oddities that might appeal to geeks, like the slates for ST:TNG and DS9 from the original feeds, with Michael Dorn or Rene Aberjonois identifying the audio channels. There are also some production track only versions of the promos, which are great for pulling clean dialogue and effects out of. I’d love to send those to someone who would appreciate them, but I’m sure Paramount would put the smackdown on me for YouTubing them.

Anyway, I’m hoping to actually put up a few videos of what I did in the old days. It’s not exactly Gone with the Wind, but it’s not terrible TV either. Since rediscovering these, I keep having dreams that I’ve gone back to work in TV. They’re always good dreams. Well, we’ve already seen that life takes you where you don’t expect to go, so who knows what the future holds?