I did indeed squeeze in one more day at Oddball before the semester ends and it becomes technically illegal. I took the opportunity to clean up the film logging project I'd been working on, basically putting away the cans that were still in the box I was using, and generally making sure that I left behind only footprints, but I was mostly there to learn how to digitize videotapes. I've digitized video before, including all 22 episodes of my old cable access show
kittypr0n, but never Betacam using professional equipment, nor in a context that means much on a resume. But I do feel that I picked up it fairly quickly; it helps that I was hooking VCRs together and generally wiring electronics together in intricate ways since I was a teenager, so I wasn't particularly intimidated by either how the cables had to be arranged in the back of the computer...
...or, more importantly, the back of the video deck.
The biggest learning curve came with the software, the legendary Final Cut Pro.
My supervisor showed me all the steps, though my failure to take notes (or, come to think of it, for there to be any task-specific documentation) meant I still did a bit of floundering before I got the hang of it. But that's all part of the process, and before the day was over, I'd digitized and cut up all the trailers in a collection called
Afro Promo, one I was already familiar with from the Other Cinema release some years ago.
There are more things I could do learn to do there -- especially
using the telecine, the device which transfers film to video, still one of the great mysteries to me -- but my time is up, and I think I made the most of it.
