Just as the video was shot on the road, nearly every version of the edit was completed from my Macbook Air. A family emergency saw me flying back to Wisconsin as soon as the shoot wrapped, and the video found itself being formed in a variety of vehicles, airplanes, airports, hotels and family houses. My bay at home is made up of two 27" displays and the occasional reference monitor. Real-estate on the 13" 1440x900 screen was at a premium, and it took a lot of smart organization and window managing with FCPX to make it work.

Keyboard shortcuts for “hide libraries” (shift+command+1) and “hide browser” (custom set to shift+command+option+alt+1) were put to heavy use. My library was diligently organized into an event for every day, with keywords for every location, shot type and action type assigned to every clip. All the location folders went into a “locations” folder for easy access, and each day/event followed the act structure of the piece pretty cleanly. “Day 1" was the piano intro for act one, “Day 2" was our road/travel day for the middle of the video, and “Day 3" was our live rooftop performance at the end. This allowed me to only need one event open, depending on which section of the video I was working on.

I can’t say enough about how valuable it is to be able to select a range within a clip, and assign it to a tag or as a “favorite” (pushing ‘f’ with a range selected). This is something that was done extremely poorly in Final Cut Classic by creating “subclips” that caused a world of problems. Locations were tagged quickly with every card dump I did (tip: go to view and select “show skimmer info” to quickly mouse over clips and see the tags), and then a careful pass was done for favorites on every clip. Favorites can’t be rushed, as quick opportunities for cutaways and transitioary elements can often be found in the most haphazard clips. Even after a couple rough cuts had been completed, I did one more real-time pass through every single clip to make sure I didn’t miss any potential gold. Any time I needed to cover a cut, I found the correct shooting location in the browser, popped over to the favorites filter (control+f), and was generally able to find whatever I needed.

Favorites, rejects, markers and keywords.

The performance of the Macbook Air really shocked me though this entire process. This computer was purchased with the intent to have something very small for flights, and on-set DIT, with the intent to replace it if I ever needed a portable editing solution. I never expected or intended it to do any kind of actual work, but cutting this piece from a thunderbolt hard drive was absolutely no problem. The 2.7K GoPro clips worked flawlessly, and the timeline easily handled the FS700's AVCHD. Even on long flights with no outlets, I was easily able to work for the majority of the flight. A mini-displayport to HDMI adapter allowed me to plug in to a large TV at my family’s house, and finally preview the video in full resolution for the first time, right around version three. Working on this laptop was by no means ideal, but it was unbelievably usable. We have come a very long way since the no-brainer split between iBooks and PowerBooks.