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February Update: Playing Catch-Up
🕑 Added 2018-03-08 14:43:18 +0000 UTC Hey team!Getting Back on Schedule
This update is a wee bit late. I was booking it to get the Monkey Island video done by the end of February, so I let the update slide, and then it slid a little longer. This will be a theme in this update.
Where the channel stands right now is my Indivisible Somerville talk serves as December's video, and Three Short Arguments about The Secret of Monkey Island is January's, which means I still owe you February. The goal was to get the Monkey Island video done in early February and spend the rest of the month working on another video, but: once I'd accepted that it was coming out in February instead of January, I decided, well, February is February, might as well alternate editing with writing scripts.
The upshot of this is that, while January's video came out at the very end of February, the next two scripts are written and I think I can get them both out this month, which will get us caught up.
As ever, there's no single reason for the delays. After the holidays and somewhat overbooking my January, I finally made the switch to Premiere and that switch was just kind of hard.
Using Premiere
Premiere and Final Cut Pro 7 are, in many ways, nearly identical, especially since you can set Premiere's hotkeys to be literally the same as FCP's. (Premiere knew they were trying to steal Final Cut's audience during the transition from Final Cut 7 to Final Cut X, and it worked damn well.) My difficulty was more... philosophical.
As ever, there are German words for what I'm talking about - Zuhanden and Vorhanden - which have to do with how we embody tools. (No, I don't have them memorized, I just looked them up.) Basically, the idea is that we think of tools as an extension of our bodies (Zuhanden) until they stop working properly (Vorhanden). We think of a bike as an extension of our legs until we get a flat tire, we think of a hammer as an extension of our arm until the head gets wobbly. Once there is friction between you and the object, it ceases to feel like a part of you, and is now an object that needs to be contended with, fixed, mastered, whatever.
Final Cut had become a pretty shitty program for me by the time I stopped using it. FCP7 hadn't been supported in years and got buggier with every system update. There were a lot of tedious foibles about the system that I just had to deal with. There are a lot of visual glitches in my videos that are a result of bad compression or weird rendering errors. But it was the devil I knew! Warts and all, Final Cut was an extension of my brain when I was editing.
Premiere wasn't. It was a thing I had to learn. In almost every way, it is a better tool. I get prettier video files at smaller sizes, it recovers projects after crashes fabulously, be able to edit unrendered footage is a dream, and I can even keep using the program while it's exporting a video.
But it was unfamiliar. And not knowing my tools made editing a lot more complicated.
This is part of why I put up with Final Cut for so long, because there is always an awkward period when I transition from one tool to another. Probably making that transition when I was already behind schedule was a bad move, but before I could even try Premiere I needed to update my OS to High Sierra, at which point FCP7 officially didn't work anymore. There was no going back.
Anyway, not trying to offer excuses, and by the end I was really getting the hang of Premiere. Just thought I'd share a bit about the editing life by way of explanation.
Perks & Rewards
The plan for jumping into long overdue BTS blog posts and annotated videos is still on, though, with two videos coming out this month, it may not be as quick as I'd planned. I'll try to get something up this month, but the videos will have to take priority, so it's going to happen wherever I find the time.
I will also start getting the ball rolling on the bonus project after we are caught up on videos.
Reminders
This was mentioned in a previous update, but I will be paneling at PAX East on April 8th (obligatory NMH link) and was recently on an episode of Serious Inquiries Only. I've made it a rule not to do any traveling, paneling, presentations, or podcasts between now and PAX; I want to focus on the channel for a little while and see what an uninterrupted stretch of work time can accomplish.
Alright, that's it for me! I will endeavor to get March's update up in a few weeks, though there may not be a ton to say by then.
Cheers,
-I
Comments
Nikki
I have no idea where you looked up those german words, but "Zuhanden" (a word I never even heard like this before) is a Suisse version for "zu Händen". That phrase is, in Hochdeutsch (standard german), only used in the context of snail mail if you want someone behind an address to receive your letter whose name is not the one of the address (-> "This mail should go "to the hands of" (-> "zu (den) Händen (von) Ian Danskin."). The Suisse version "zuhanden" is an archaic word for something being available or reachable, but not part of today's common language. "Vorhanden" in standard german describes the existence of something; in the context of tools we'd say "Die vorhandenen Werkzeuge werden nicht ausreichen" ("The vorhandenen tools won't suffice), meaning that the tools that are available to us won't suffice for what we want to do. "Zu Händen" is, even though one could think that considering its words, not used to describe what we have "at our hands" at all (that's what "vorhanden" is for, in a way). There's no distinct word to describe a situation where "vorhandene" tools won't suffice anymore, you usually just negate the sufficiency or existence in such a situation. While I‘m at German lessons anyway: We do have a word for negating a negation: „Doch“ is used to correct a wrongly negating statement, like „Ian‘s last name isn‘t Danskin“, then the answer would be „doch“ as it actually is Ian‘s last name. „You didn‘t go to the grocery store, right?“ would also be answered with „doch“ if you actually did go there, and „Youtube comments aren‘t that bad“ would obviously get the same answer. (I just like that there‘s no English equivalent to this handy word, and wanted to brag a little. :D )
Lie Sax
I don't speak for everyone, but I'm sure many would agree that you don't owe us anything and we will be grateful for any bit of content you put up. Excuses are not needed, but thanks for providing context!
Ian Danskin
I don't actually speak German, so when I read Heidegger's terms I didn't know they weren't standard!
PC Escobar
"Also, how am I supposed to skip a line if the enter key posts my comment?! WTF Patreon?" Annoying as hell, isn't it? Looks like SHIFT-ENTER might work.
Humanoïde
Hey, so I didn't even know that the Indivisible Somerville conference video had been posted and, given the fact it only has currently 4k views, I'm probably not the only one who missed the memo. You probably mentioned it in some update that I missed, but you should probably do it again in one of your main videos with a link in the description so that people might easily access it. Sure, it might attract some... undesirable attention, but more visibility is probably worth having to bear the presence of alt-right trolls. Also, how am I supposed to skip a line if the enter key posts my comment?! WTF Patreon? Edit : SHIFT+ENTER does work! Thanks PC Escobar.
Nikki
Heidegger was a philosopher, not a linguist - your usage implies that it's the actual usage of the german words, which is absolutely not the case. Referencing philosophical ideas through language in order to frame your own processes is a convenient way to get others to understand what you're coming from, but the way you're wording it here it sounds like you're just using german language in reference to german language having a lot of words for many different things - which is not what this is, so your frame is presented in a confusing, potentially even misleading, way. ^^
Ian Danskin
For anyone wondering about my questionable German, it's from Heidegger. If it's crappy wording, take it up with him: <a href="https://dominationandmastery.wordpress.com/2007/09/29/vorhanden-zuhanden-and-dasein-three-modes-of-being/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://dominationandmastery.wordpress.com/2007/09/29/vorhanden-zuhanden-and-dasein-three-modes-of-being/</a>
Ian Danskin
Yep, I mention that in the post!
Alex Brueckner
You're probably already aware, but as a note on switching from FCP7 to Premiere, there is a keyboard shortcuts preset that will remap everything to match the FCP7 default layout. Not super helpful if you remapped stuff inside FCP, but it's a good starting point for the transition.
