EDITING... now THERE'S a challenge. Editing is, I believe,

a combination of art and science, with a smidge of luck thrown in. Some small producers like myself who do their own shooting try to soften the

process by doing some in camera editing, or strictly adhearing to a shooting script. I find those approaches too confining. I prefer to shoot footage as

I deem necessary, running and gunning, as they say, and sort it all out at the end. As to on camera interviews I just start the camera and let it roll,

picking the good stuff out in a series of viewings, cutting segments out and transposing them as needed. The photo above is a shot of my old edit suite

at the old house. However, it represents the same basic configuration I have now. My current setup consists of:

- a self buit PC utilizing an AMD64X2 processor

- 8 gigs of ram

- 2 terabites of SATA storage including a 500gig RAID for scratch disks (very important for Adobe Premiere and Photoshop)

- a NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT PCIe video card with 1 gig of video ram

- 2 Acer 19 inch LCD Monitors for production

- one 4:3 15 inch LCD SD preview monitor

- one 32 inch HD LCD preview monitor / tv combo

- a multi-format card reader

- a mini DV camcorder for digital tape capture

- a Samson CO1u USB studio microphone on an articulated arm

- 2 DVD recorders (no blu-ray yet).

SOFTWARE: Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, Adobe Encore CS4, Adobe Audition 1.5 with Adobe Loopology, plus several

                       plugins for Premiere to help upconvert SD to HD.

All of this represents a system I have learned to master over several years and feel quite comfortable with. My choice of a

PC based system as opposed to an Apple based system grew out of a very early experience with Apple Computer. I had

purchased an Apple IIc for my daughter to use in her studies late in high school and college. It served us VERY well and

I was very pleased. When Apple announced the McIntosh (MAC) I couldn't wait to get my hands on one. The IIc was

equipped with a composite video out, allowing me to use software to do video titling very early in the game of editing

machines. But as I read up on the upcoming MAC, the news was not good. It seems that Apple had simply left all

of their Apple folks in the dust as the new MAC would NOT run the Apple software. I was disappointed and angry.

This was around the time that IBM gave up on trying to keep their hardware proprietary and PC clones became

popular. So, I built myself a 386 PC and the rest is history. My son owns a video studio in Manhattan, NYC, and

has slowly replaced his PC based editors with MACS. Its a personal choice. For me, the Windows operating system

is much more flexible that the MAC OS, allowing me to access system files and the registry to make subtle changes

and customize the OS for my own needs. With a MAC you simply cannot do that.