aspire |əˈspī(ə)r| verb [ intrans. ] direct one’s hopes or ambitions toward achieving something.
aspiration |ˌaspəˈrā sh ən| noun 1 ( usu. aspirations ) a hope or ambition of achieving something.
DERIVATIVES: aspirational |- sh ənl| adjective (in sense 1) .
I define aspirational marketing as “success by association”. You see it all the time when companies promote tie-ins with athletes, celebrities, adventurers and artists.
It’s the attempt to get you to subliminally feel that if you buy this product, you’ll somehow have the same ability, charm or success of the endorser or the achievement. Danica Patrick and GoDaddy. Daniel Craig and Omega, Leonardo DeCaprio and TAG Heuer. Omega and the first moon walk or Rolex and an ascent to the summit of Mt. Everest.
Guitar players are all too familiar with this, as nearly every manufacturer of guitars, amps and pedals has a series of signed artists who endorse the product. Many have custom deals, with signature guitars made in their name. Some feature customizations actually suggested by the artist, but sometimes these are only meant to pay homage to their style. Of course, logic tells you that using the same guitar as Stevie Ray Vaughn, Joe Satriani, Eddie Van Halen or Steve Vai won’t make you the next guitar hero. That doesn’t stop the dream factory from running overtime in our minds – the one tuned to the wavelength of aspirational marketing.
Makers of editing systems aren’t immune to this game either. Avid touts the list of the many Oscar-winning editors who use Media Composer, while Apple counters with Walter Murch, Angus Wall, Billy Fox and others. Lightworks – always a favorite of Thelma Schoonmaker – was able to join the game again this year through Tariq Anwar, film editor of The King’s Speech. I personally enjoy reading these various case studies. I’ve also enjoyed interviewing and writing the more than 30 such stories I’ve done myself. Yet, promoting a tool by saying that Joe Film Editor uses it is often a hot topic on editing forums. Many editors feel that a Hollywood blockbuster is so far removed from the world of cutting spots and corporate videos, that it has absolutely no bearing on what they do or the needs they have in an NLE.
This association comes with some danger, because many manufacturers are happy to let omission blur the lines of how their products were actually used. For instance, Adobe products were used in various aspects of Avatar and The Social Network, yet Adobe has carefully avoided promoting the actual editing system and DI system used. As a result, quite a few folks have come away with the impression that Premiere Pro was the editing tool for these films. In fact, these films were cut on Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro respectively – with Quantel Pablo/iQ handling the DI.
I suppose aspirational marketing is like all advertising. At the purely primal level, advertising is based on the concept that using the product will make you attractive to the opposite sex, will bring you fame and fortune and will whiten your teeth. Like the guitarist analogy, I’m sure every editor knows that using Final Cut won’t impart the editing skills of Murch, Wall, Baxter or the Coens on them, but it does offer some validation. In other words, if I’m using the same product as this famous film editor, then it clearly can get the highest level job done – and by extension – I have made the right choice in using the same tool.
The truth of the matter, though, is that this may or may not be the case. Many Hollywood feature film editors are not power users of either computers or editing software. The Coens will tell interviewers point blank that they had no idea how to use a mouse when they first started with Final Cut. Many Avid film editors are quite upfront in saying that they like Media Composer precisely because they don’t have to think about how it works. They are so used to it, in fact, that little changes, like adjusting the functions of the modifiers keys or adding Smart Tool have been greeted by a surly response from long-time editors.
Most professional editors working in anonymity on spots, corporate videos and reality shows probably have a far better grasp of how to get the most out of the software than the average A-list feature film editor. These working pros probably also know what holes are left in the toolset and where they excel. Rightfully so, every time Avid or another manufacturer brings out an Oscar-winning film editor, a lot of folks simply can’t see the relevance.
I don’t discount this feeling, but I have a different outlook. I love reading these stories because they often talk about workflow or creative challenges that do relate to my own projects. Sure, the demands of a high-budget studio film are different than that of a corporate image video, but we both have the challenges of how to satisfy the director, how to get the show to time and how to deal with new technology – from RED to HDSLRs to ALEXA to Stereo3D. I’m happy to see Avid bring a line-up of feature film and television editors and mixers as speakers to NAB to share their experiences. As part of this marketing effort, Avid also hosts a very interesting set of webisodes, called The Rough Cut. Avid staffer Matt Feury hosts and produces these various episodes, which feature conversations with many working editors.
Does aspirational marketing make me want to buy the product? Probably not, but my interest goes far beyond that. On the other hand, using the same tools as a high-visibility user doesn’t hurt – IF – it still meets the needs that I have to do the best job for my client.
©2011 Oliver Peters
A marker list can be exported as a tab delimited text document, which will open in most word processors or spreadsheet applications. This list will indicate comments, type, duration, color and timecode. Marker lists may be helpful as a reference for interviews in the absence of an actual transcript. Or they may be used to document notes for editorial changes.
Furthermore, the Find command (cmd-F) for the sequence lets you search by names and markers. Looking for a word you know you typed into a marker? Simply use Find in the sequence and it will take you to that spot. Of course, the more information you typed at the time, the better of a resource this becomes.
Get operates as a standalone application and is therefore independent of any written script or transcript. Think of it as a Spotlight-style search tool that is optimized for speech. Get can be installed for various languages and currently supports US English, UK English and Latin American Spanish. For now, Final Cut Pro is the only supported NLE, although Get can be used without FCP, as well.
After the initial indexing is completed, the rest of it is pretty simple. Typically you perform searches within Get’s user interface. Results will be grouped using various criteria, but normally Get will group search results according to a confidence indication. Search results that are listed as Very Confident will generally always match the search word or phrase, whereas Less Confident might not. One way to dial in search results is to use the Score Threshold pulldown menu. For example, if you search for a term and select a Score > 95 value, Get will return far fewer successful results than if you use a value of Score > 55. Lowering the score will achieve more total results, but also less accuracy.
Get’s Export routine is used to bring clips into a Final Cut Pro project. Individual clips or a group of clips can be exported from the Get interface into any existing FCP project. Get has the ability to access the project, so either clips can be sent directly into existing bins or new FCP project bins containing these search results can be created and exported right from within Get. When you return to the FCP project, the appropriate folder and clips will have been added. Each clip will also contain markers to identify the location of the search term. In addition, Get lets you export only markers, in the case where you are analyzing clips already in FCP.
I performed testing with an existing series of corporate videos produced about a family-owned Australian winery. The original audio was recorded on a Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Some audio was rather low and, of course, everyone spoke with an Australian accent. Get delivered good results using the US English installation, in spite of these challenges. Even specific Australian words, like less-common town names, were easily found. Without question, I’d have to say Get definitely works as advertised.
Shared storage solutions are designed to permit multiple rooms (edit suites, audio studios, graphics, etc.) to connect to a common media network in order to access files from any room. The two basic types are file-level and volume-level systems.
In a volume-level system, storage is divided into numerous volumes or partitions (organized by room or by project). Various read-only or read/write profiles are established in the controlling SAN software. Typically a user will have write authority in one room for only a single volume, but can mount the other storage volumes with read-only permission. Of course, various profiles can be established based on project needs, so a user can be assigned write authority to additional volumes when not in use by another editor.
SANs typically use Fibre Channel or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10-Gig-E) for fast media data rates, but a SAN can also be built upon standard Gigabit Ethernet (Gig-E), especially when large data rates aren’t required. If you have over six rooms – or you need to work with multiple streams of online-quality media – then Fibre Channel is the best option. On the other hand, a shop with a handful of bays cutting with a low bandwidth resolution like OfflineRT or DV25 will probably be happy with a Gig-E system.
The largest, most advanced SANs for FCP environments commonly use 
In between are the so-called SAN-in-a-can systems, which tend to offer the best approach for small editing boutiques. Examples include 
One approach that offers many benefits is to augment a volume-level SAN with an installation of 
I frequently work at one such facility and here is how it works. The network layout was designed by area systems integrator, 
On Day 2 and each of the subsequent editing days, the editor starts by checking-out the FCP project from Final Cut Server. The check-out step copies the FCP project file from Final Cut Server to a local destination, such as the editing workstation’s desktop. Assuming all media files were successfully uploaded to Server the night before, all clips in the FCP browser are now linked to the media that’s on the Final Cut Server volume and not the local volume any more. Any new media added during the course of the day stays local during that day.
Archiving can still be an issue with modern SAN systems, but Final Cut Server adds a level of control. You can move media to external storage, like raw eSATA drives or LTO tapes and then subsequently identify on-line and near-line media files. Proxy files stay of the system for review and searches and Final Cut Server will prompt editors to reload the high-res media from an archive, should a requested clip have been archived off of the Server volume.
digitalfilms 