Yet more lessons learned from my latest endeavor!

Know the Flow!

By this, I mean, walk through your entire process and take note of every piece of equipment, and the people operating it, and how you'll get from shooting to output of your project.

For example, we had a really BIG hiccup in our production. I'll readily admit that I can do pre-production and post production quite well, but fall short on the technical aspects of production day itself. I'm not well versed in the equipment/techy side of things. I've got to study...

Here is what happened:
We had some super sweet HD cameras and loads of P2 cards to shoot on. Someone (thankfully) brought up a few days before the shoot that we'd need an external drive to dump the footage on.

Lesson 1: Make sure your external drive is both compatible with your computer (Western Digital didn't cut it for my Mac) and it has a pretty hefty fire wire cable (USB is gonna take a LOT of time).

Lesson 2: Make sure you have both the equipment and software needed to download from your P2 cards. We didn't have a card reader or the software, so we production halted until we could scramble to get the right stuff.

Lesson 3: Make sure you've got someone dedicated on set that knows their stuff, to take your precious content trapped in those cards and lovingly transfer it while the shooting continues.

Lesson 4: Organize in the beginning. Know where to save files and folders and what to name them.

Lesson 5: Know, in advance, what kind of output you are gonna need for your project if you have somebody waiting for it. Save yourself a lot of re-editing and re-processing time.

I, yet again, learned from my mistakes. I quite often find myself not wanting to be a dictator and wanting to trust that everyone involved has it all figured out. But, there is a happy line between dictator and having your ducks in a row. I'm still aiming for that place. Let's hope I find it sooner, rather than later. Until then? I'll gladly offer up my lessons learned so that others don't have to stumble...