Thursday, 5 September 2013

The down side of being pathologically organized

I had my first editing class tonight, so that's 3 of the 4 so far. I think it will be a good class. He's clearly a knowledgable and experienced editor. And I even think he has a plan. He certainly has a syllabus, and he's been doing this particular class for a while. But his approach, this evening anyway, felt very random. I doubt it was actually random. Maybe I'm too used to taking (and giving) software training classes. Even when I've had trainers who weren't very good - which was rare, but has happened - they were organized. I suppose it's the difference of teaching 3-5 straight days vs 13 weeks in a semester. In a 5 day class of mine that ends up being about 30 hours of instruction, and our semester it's 39 hours so it's not that big a difference. But because it stretches over months instead of a week I think it will end up being much more laid back. Or at least this instructor feels rather laid back. And slightly rambling. I'll just have to get used to it. Maybe I'll even end up liking it. Just right now it is so against the grain.

He's treating this as an advanced class because we've all taken production courses already where we were required to edit with Avid. But those were production courses so there was only just enough editing instruction to get us through getting our projects done. We all can manage a rough assembly and he really shouldn't need to be doing things like teaching us how to make in and out points. And he didn't, and nobody needed him to. Yet I would still just once like for someone to do things like walk me through the interface and make sure I know what things are called so that when I'm trying to look things up I'm using Avid terms rather than Final Cut or Premiere terms. I suppose it won't kill me to just sit down and go through every page of the text instead of using it as a reference as the instructor suggested.

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