It is the last day of the olympics and the Canada/USA hold medal hockey game is on, and I am still working.
We are going to be packaging this game for tonights encore plus show, then its off to the wrap party.
The game is on in nearly every edit suite and anywhere there is a monitor. There are people walking all around downtown winnipeg with canada jerseys on heading to the MTS center and various pins to watch the game, its pretty cool.
When we say we are going to "push" an item to air it means that we are sending it as a completed item ready for air to the playback machines, which in our case are a couple of avid media composers.
Thursday was a record for our edit suite in the number of items pushed. In total we pushed 30 individual items which amounted to over 3 hours of 40 minutes of material. Lets see the other edit suites top that!
Here are pics of the avid bins with all of the items we pushed.
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Wow, super busy day today, 15 hours of pretty much non-stop building. Today we completed the most peices ever that we have in a single day. Tomorrow when I get in I’ll see if I can list off all of the things we sent to air, brain is too fried to do that right now. Only 3 more days to go!
Today we have 15.5 hours of olympic broadcast to fill
French show 10:30 to 2
english show 2 to 5:30
Aboriginal show 5:30 to 8
french show 8 to 11:30
Encore plus 11:30 to 2
We will full that with live sports, highlight packages, features on athletes and interesting people, live calls from the desk, etc.
Been watching a lot of curling lately, interestingly enough a regular podcast I listen to from Scientific American talked about the Physics of curling recently.
You can listen to it here.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=ice-ice-baby-the-physics-of-curling-10-02-18
Pairs figure skating is probably my favorite olympic event, next to moguls skiing. I really like the art of grace of figure skating, like a dance on ice.
I have never been much of a sports fan, which is somewhat ironic because I have done media work in sports for over 11 years. In college we covered hockey and basketball games in full mobiles, and I was a regular camera operator for manitoba moose games at the winnipeg arena and the MTS center for about 5 seasons.
I think the appeal to me about figure skating is its similarity to pro wrestling, of which I am a fan. What? Pro wrestling? Yes, they see very similar. They are both an athletic exhibition with pre-planned routines and moves, which require a partner to co-operate with you in order to put on a show, though pro wrestling largely improvised. Perhaps we will see pro wrestling at the olympics someday 
I have been watching a lot of curling over the last 4 days, making a lot of highlight packages. Remember those old school curling brooms that were like the kind that grandma used to sweep the floor? Those were hardcore. The new brooms might work better, but you don’t look as cool while using them.
I have used nearly every Avid editing product in the 11 years that I started working on them; xpress, Media Composer, xpress dv, xpress pro, Symphony and Newscutter.
Currently we see running Symphony Nitris in the Aptn edit suite and I have a media composer running at home. Here on our setup for the olympics we are using the Newscutter systems.
The differences between these software packages in their current forms vary; media composer and Newscutter are very similar, though Newscutter has a few quirks that I find annoying like not being able to enter trim mode by lassoing a cut in the timeline (see the pic below) and having strangely coloured icons for sequences that I can’t change. Otherwise they have much of the same tools and procedures.
I will admit that I do miss my trusty symphony Nitris that I use day in and out while working in creative services. The biggest difference between it and the other edit systems is that it has very robust color correction tools which help when really trying to get the best picture possible.
Watching the Canada/USA hockey game right now, getting ready to package it for tonights encore plus show, right now it is in the first period, 2 for the americans and 1 for canada.
