The following took place in the early nineties when Paul was a Producer/ Director at Border Television and was about to make editing history.
We had been on the Isle of Man for a week and had just completed another episode of our continuing country series “The Hopeful Traveller”. The Viking longboat was the final shot. David Bean (aka “The Hopeful Traveller”) concluded the episode by standing in the prow of a Viking longboat (manned by Manx volunteers) looking towards England and his next adventure. Actually, in the photo, he was at the stern looking decidedly grumpy. This was because the crew had previously told the manager of the hotel we were staying at it was David’s 70th birthday.
David was very well known on the island, and to celebrate the milestone the hotel threw a party. The problem was that David was actually in his early sixties and not 70, it was the crew’s way of having a joke. He was less than happy having to go along with the celebrations, rather than let down the hotel staff who had put in a lot of hard work. This, however, was not the reason I was about to make history. That had started when I was invited to the edit suite prior to filming the series.
I was greeted by a group of engineers and editors reverentially clustered around seven plastic boxes the size and shape of cereal packets. Stacked on top of each other with wires protruding they looked pretty uninspiring to me but the editors who were crowded around it appeared as if they were witnessing a holy event.
I turned to my editor and asked what the boxes were. “They, my programme-making friend, are 7 gigabytes of computer memory”. “Really, they looked like cereal boxes” I said. He gave me a withering look and explained that each box was one gigabyte of memory bought for £2500 each. The company had bought seven of these and they were now stacked up neatly. We, the editor and myself, had the honour of cutting the first computerised programme together with the new AVID editing system, shipped in straight from America.
Now, at this point I must explain that I had been chosen not for my award-winning directing skills but because I was trained to shoot on film and my ratios (the difference between how much material I shot and the amount that was used in the final programme) were some of the lowest in the company. When I worked on film, a magazine of film was 400 feet in length and I would record 11 minutes of action. At £100 for each magazine when processed you could rack up thousands of pounds of stock if you didn’t know what you wanted to film. I had been trained by a crew tired of inexperienced directors filming anything that moved hoping to be able to cut it in editing. Consequently, my ratio was 2 to 1. This meant that for every 2 minutes I filmed I would have 1 minute to transmit after editing. Some directors shot 7 or even 10 times what was needed which was expensive and inefficient. So, it was felt, I would have less material to put into the computer.
With my tapes from the Isle of Man I looked forward to a historic edit. I’d been told that the material would be put into this massive 7GB memory and I would be able to look at the screen to see all my hard work and, before my very eyes, the programme would be cut before I could blink.
“I can’t see anything” I wailed. “It looks like a snowstorm”. Yes, before me I could see shadowy figures on the screen, moving blurs. “What’s happened to my work, what have you done to it?” The editor had at least the decency to look sheepish. The problem was the memory. The video footage took so much memory we could only edit about 5 minutes in one go. That footage had to go in at the lowest resolution which accounted for the ‘snowstorm’. We would cut it, then, at night and quite mysteriously, the computer would think about it and produce the final cut at full resolution.
And so began my long and frustrating journey. Each day we would try to make out the pictures in the snowstorm, cut them, and each night the computer would render them at full resolution, or not. Some nights, the computer would wait until dawn light and then stop working, and the process would have to start all over again!
Eventually, we did make history though, and we were one of the first in the country to completely make a series using this revolutionary AVID system. The programme was completed on time and was the dawn of a new and exciting era for broadcast television.