I would like to announce that the awards are in and we came away with three out of four. The film I worked on as an editor “The Astray” was recently in the AOF Festival in Pasadena, CA. This festival was named ‘One of the top 25 festivals worth the fees by Movie Maker Magazine 2009. It was nominated in four separate categories including: Best Actor-Short James Arlen, Best Actress, Michelle Graci, Best Villain-Short Jon Fava, and Breakout Action Star Female-Short.

At the end of the awards ceremony we came away with three winners. James Arlen won Best Actor-Short. Jon Fava won Best Villain-Short and Michelle Graci won for Breakout Action Star Female-Short.

It is always a good feeling to have your work recognized by others in the industry and by the moviegoers themselves. I feel proud to have contributed in helping make the film what it is. All of the actors deserve the credit as they are the performers and the artist committing to their roles. But I would also like to acknowledge the Director Patrick Lazzara and his work. All of the nominations were for the actors but without a director with a clear vision, a film and its actors will not get recognized. Congratulations to all of the actors and to the films director Patrick Lazzara.

In the workflow of an editor the task of converting footage from a dvd to a workable format is not always an easy one. There are many different types of video converter’s that can be used and some of them work better than others. I have recently come across a FREE video converter for both the mac and windows platform. MPEG streamclip is a video converter that works great as far as I am concerned. It is fast and has several options that allow the user a lot of control. If you would like to try it out for yourself, it is definitely worth it in my opinion. It’s also free so why not give it a shot.

Recently I had the pleasure of working with a group of guys who have a very good business plan in line and are working on developing some great new media. I cut a sizzle reel for them, which included some beautiful footage shot in Brazil. All of the videos I helped cut are available on their new website tightspotsmedia.com. I also converted all of their video content to flash for the website. In my opinion if you are going to put videos on your site and have them exist on your server and not a third party, than this is the best way to do so. I am going to be doing a lot more work with these guys so please take a look at what they have going on.

Having produced, directed, and edited several projects of my own I have had to workout many problems that I didn’t think of in the beginning of the process. I have formulated a few different lists of questions that help resolve issues that are not often thought of in the pre-production process. These lists have been very helpful because many unforeseen issues that may arise later in the production process can be addressed beforehand.

Since I have been the editor on all of my own projects I have had to answer these questions before I began filming anything. Here are some of those questions. Based on the type of codec I am going to be filming in, how much storage space will I need? What kind of workflow will this footage have with my NLE editing system? Do I need to convert the footage to a different format and how timely with that be? What is the final output of my project going to be? DVD? Broadcast? Big-Screen? Internet?

Most of those questions above involve the editing process, which has been my main focus of discussion. I have created a list of questions that deal with the topics of production and direction. Those will each be discussed individually as they are much larger and demand more attention to detail.