Okay, that’s not exactly true, but at least I’m editing on computers now. I found this photo tonight as I was consolidating boxes of random ephemera. This photo was ten years ago when I worked at KMTR in Springfield, Oregon (market #120).
Here are a few items of note:
1. CRT Monitor on a PC running Windows 3.1. We weren’t lucky enough to have Windows ‘98 (or even ‘95) on many of our newsroom computers at the time. It was considered a “luxury”, if you can believe that.
2. Two way radio. This is how we communicated with the folks out in the field, as only a few people at the station even had a cell phone. If you tried to talk while someone else was on the radio you’d get this insanely high pitched squeal. Also, the buttons would stick, so sometimes people that you just ‘hung up’ with would hear all sorts of extra stuff.
3. DVC PRO deck. We shot on DVC-PRO, but only had enough money for a handful of decks. Only one of them had a shuttle knob.
4. 3/4″ Tape Decks. We would shoot on a digital format and then edit down to analog tape. It seems kinda dumb now, but at the time it worked out okay.
5. The Resume Tape. I had just finished making a tape of all my news packages (which I can hardly bring to myself to watch at this point) and then snapped this photo. I said something outloud - probably to myself - like, “Someday I’m gonna look back at this and I won’t believe how sucky everything was.” Well, the photo is certainly dated, but now that I check it out… it doesn’t look so bad. The archive tapes were all neatly organized, and even they use timecodes which is something my current station has never done (seriously). And while I remember hating the edit bay (singular: everyone was in the same closet-sized room), I can honestly say it’s cleaner and nicer looking that what I’m working in now. It’s crazy to have perspective now, you know? (Also, I went back to KMTR a year later and the edit bay was ripped out and all the equipment was upgraded, so my photo was kinda dated even back then.)
6. Fascist ranting. I almost forgot this one. These sheets are instructions on how to edit, for those photographers who couldn’t remember (seriously). But also, there were also several terse bulletins from one of the main editors, who would write a weekly Unibomber manifesto about proper editing and archiving procedures - which mainly involved writing down stuff you shot on a number index cards.
