What I do at My Job

Because I am an editor, you might think I would 'edit'. However, a large portion of my job involves digitzing and rendering; two activities with no creative value whatsoever. Any video that's going to be cut on a computer needs to be "digitized," meaning converted from a magnetic tape into a bunch of 1s and 0s so i can mess with it. Often, an assistant editor does this tedious work at night, or some time the editor isn't working, but becuase of various restrictions (money/time/number of computers available) I have taken on a lot of it myself for this particular show.

Any time I apply effects to a piece of video (dissolves, glows, resizes, you name it), they have to be "rendered," meaning written to the computer as a new file, one that marries the effect to the video clip. If you are editing a show "offline," which is generally the way it's done, the whole process is sped up because you digitize the clips at a much lower resolution (less pixels), and the computer has less trouble reading and writing these simpler files. We don't edit offline.

Both of these things take too long. Digitizing must be done in real time, and rendering depends on the speed of your computer.

This computer is slow.

The upshot of all this is that I spend an inoordinate amount of time sitting at my computer with no actual "work" to do per se, but without the freedom to leave. Digitzing must be monitored, the tapes taken in and out of the machine (yes, I know a robot could do this). Rendering doesn't take long enough to warrent leaving the room, but takes too long for someone like me (read: impatient) to sit patiently and watch.

So instead I do other things. Read blogs, play solitaire, write blogs (just started) and continually check my finances. Sometimes I read a book or a magazine. Ocassionally i'll get a phone call out of the way. Often I snack. I can visit co-workers for brief periods. Or go back and forth to the bathroom. Or annoy my boss.

It makes me wonder...how much of work is actually work? Do other people spend this much time wasting time? Why can't I come up with a better diversion, one that somehow contributes to the world at large?

Ooop, the render's done....