My AV Club

I was never in AV Club in high school, if we even had one, but I’ve always felt like an honorary member. I can go deep into the warren trying to figure out why Thing A can’t function when connected to Thing B and am willing to spend at least half a day (or much longer) trying to make things work. In the early 2000s, when I was teaching myself video production and editing on Mac computers running the original Final Cut Pro, each editing project was an experiment. How can I get this type of footage into FCP and why is that crash happening? It was not a very efficient way to work, but it was practically the only option DIY filmmakers had at the time. (There was Adobe Premiere but I never knew anyone who relied on it back then—the popular Premiere Pro of today was completely rebuilt in the early 2000s and still wasn’t widely used until Apple introduced its much-maligned Final Cut Pro X in 2011.) The film and TV business still used either old-school flatbed film editing (in which you literally cut and pasted pieces of film) or the original non-linear editing software, Avid (which rose from the ashes of EditDroid, a Lucas-founded non-linear system that was not successful and sold to Avid in the early nineties).

Avid was priced out of reach of ordinary nerds for a long time, as it became the standard in the movie business. You could learn Avid in school or on the job and that was about it. However, with FCP you could teach yourself editing at home, as long as you were wiling to work through the many kinks and shortcomings. FCP was almost immediately a better editor than Avid which, until recently, was an absurdly poorly imagined, difficult to use, klugey piece of shit that Avid editors simply assumed was The Best because they still remembered editing on a flatbed and because a top movie studio Avid installation cost $100,000 plus.

Things have changed a great deal today, but the point is I still think about what I can do with the technology I have and how to make it more useful and get ideas about things I’d like to try and then see if I can make them happen. In the early 2000s, for example, I theorized a future product I called the “Genie,” which would take all of the single use tech we had at the time—camera, phone, video camera, GPS, laptop, DVD player, TV—and put it all into one device. Steve Jobs, it turns out, was having the same thought.

Now I find myself thinking about mixtapes. I loved to make mixtapes in my youth. I was the guy who was editing short videos using two VCRs; I started editing movie clips into my mixtapes, too. I eventually transitioned to mix CDs and I’m kind of sad that this isn’t really a thing anymore (though I have a friend who makes an annual mix CD that he sends out, which I love). But what about a video mix?

I’ve had mixed results trying to create even simple Blu-Ray discs, without fancy menus or anything. But I’m considering trying again with Roxio’s Toast software—which gets pretty bad reviews but is one of the only packages capable of authoring on a Mac. I’d like to include a bunch of fun short videos and play around with interactive menus and make it fun to discover what’s on the disc, and make it playable in a few different ways. But this is already a pretty outdated format that doesn’t reflect how most people watch things today. What I’d really like to do is create a video mixtape with a huge capacity on an SD stick that anyone could simply plug into their computer or HDTV that would just work. It would have a menu system like a DVD and could hold huge HD movie files, at minimum.

Yesterday I started trying some minor tests to see what was possible. I could find no software, so far, that does what I want—although press kit software is a possibility. Another possibility is using HTML. There are myriad problems with these approaches, however. I want to incorporate large video files, which press kits typically do not include. There’s also the interoperability issue. For example:

Let’s say I want to create a USB stick to use on my LG 4K TV. The LG has a USB jack for this purpose. However, it will only accept USB devices formatted as Fat32 or NFTS. I can format the stick to Fat32, but then each file must be smaller than 4GB, which rules out HD and 4K movie files. To get around this, I found cheap software that would allow me format a device as NFTS (which Mac won’t do natively). I dumped a 25 GB video file on this device. My LG was able to detect this drive and even display a thumbnail from the video—but it couldn’t play the file, which was presumably too large. Why? Was the TV trying to load the entire file into memory?

This kind of thing requires a lot of trial and error. It’s also of minimal value to anyone. I enjoy wasting time in this way, personally, but the knowledge gained is pretty esoteric.