First Pass Edit: MR036 - Dead Drop Spike

YouTube Link: youtu.be/q0h5KMYrR3M

This FPE has a runtime of 1:06:13, only 15.4% of our footage was used in the episode.

• Edited Episode: youtu.be/sLQRCxiDHA4
• FPE Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp0X6DVFEcil7oLxZ67SsMp5rGkGb8fn

What a blast from the past! I grabbed some old hard drives and thought it would be fun to do a few FPEs from old videos.

This was back when Bryce and I were the entirety of the production crew. So this episode was all hands on deck, but still very small scale with few moving parts. Bryce was on a shoulder rig with the GH2 (no stabilization, shot in 1080) and I was on the full glidecam vest and our then-new GH4 (I don't think this had camera stabilization either, shot in 4K). Bryce was also on audio duty, which in mobile situations like this, basically involve setting up mics beforehand, hitting record, zipping up the audio bag, putting on headphones, and just monitoring by ear while you walk with the crew. You really only have the opportunity to stop if things sound particularly bad or a mic dies or something.

I often talk about how we approach recording the show with a certain line of documentary mentality, and this especially feels true to that form. Lot of swinging around, trying to find the right angles without sacrificing your shot as you get there, plenty of running to different vantages.

The memory's a little hazy at this point, but I think this was the episode that, at the time, we almost lost all of the footage for. The video had already been edited and published, but our local footage storage NAS completely filled up for the first time. I basically had the better part of a terabyte spread across various hard drives while I was buying time for us to offload the NAS data to cold storage and implement new cleared drives. I had accidentally deleted this shoot off of my primary footage hard drive one week to make room for whatever video I was editing at the time, and I only realized a couple weeks later that all of that footage hadn't been backed up. I've had a couple moments like this over the years, and it honestly never stops being mortifying. Luckily, I found a copy that I had stored on a dusty little My Passport that I was using to transfer footage from Brian's house to my computer.

I have a much more rigorous protocols for deleting data now.

* post-publishing edit: I looked it up and apparently the episode lost is backmasking, which we filmed right before heading downtown for the utility graffiti video. Everything else about the account is accurate, except, most significantly, I don't think the footage was ever actually recovered. Lessons learned the hard way.

Since we only had 2 cams running, it didn't make much sense to me to conform the entire video to 16:9, so this is supposed to be extremely wide. It'll look the same to people watching on 16:9 displays as if I kept it to that ratio, but anybody with ultrawide monitors will be able to get just a little more out of it. I figured that made a little more sense than a weirdly tall video, but all options seemed awkward.

If you all have some ideas for an old episode that you wish had a FPE, let me know and I'll look into it. I was thinking of maybe doing one of our older Trever videos as well.

Brandt H. -- editor, camera operator