Nerd mom is a “yes lady” living in a “no ma’am” world

I was listening to Elvis Mitchell interview Jeff Bridges this weekend about why he’s worked with so many new directors, and with such success. Bridges said it was because (and I’m paraphrasing) the scripts had been good, but also because the new guys surround themselves with the best people who know what they are doing, and that they are enthusiastic, because they don’t know yet what they CAN’T do. I don’t KNOW yet what I can’t do. But I’m learning.

I learned last week, that I can’t edit on any of our four computers. I tried to learn how much computer I would need to edit the footage off the 5D Mk II. But ask 7 camera/computer nerds, get 7 different answers. This brings me to the portion of our program where I go to Samy’s camera looking for answers. I know bettter. But I wasn’t having much luck in some of the online forums, and was getting conflicting stories about my computer question, and my other questions, which were about battery life when shooting the 5D, and compact-flash capacity. As in is there some ballpark out there about how long my battery will last when shooting video, and roughly how many minutes of footage will a 8, or 16, or 32gb compactflash card hold. Here is the response I got from the prince at Samy’s:

The Wizard “That’s unknowable”
Me “Really? Unknowable?” (apparently compactflash capacity is much like god, you just have to have faith)
The Wizard “Well, they don’t publish that kind of data”
Me “Right, sure, I just thought since you’re in here dealing with people who are shooting on this camera EVERY DAY, you might have come up with some anecdotal information about it”
The Wizard “Well, here’s what I always tell people, when I’m shooting, I don’t go in thinking, huh, I wonder how many bullets it’ll take if I encounter a bear, I go in prepared to KILL the bear. I go in with so much equipment my assistant’s back in broken. Then I don’t have to worry about it.”
Me “Uhm yeah, ok that’s super helpful” backing slowly away from the counter

I know what he’s saying is “You’re gonna need a bigger boat”, but geez… Here’s my very practical mom solution. I have two 8gb cards that I’ll use. I have various smaller cards, that I’m assuming will be useless for any video capture, but I can use in the old 20D to get behind the scenes shots, because I know you will all be dying to see me behind the camera in my pink lamé tube top, and ankle boots. I’ll have my macbook, and dedicated external hard drive on set, that I will have an assistant dumping the cards onto, so we can re-use them. I’m going to get a 16gb San Disk Extreme card, even though the man behind the curtain said I needed the pro version which was $100 more. I’ve been shooting little test videos with the 8gb cards that capture 60mb/s and it’s been fine. I bought a backup battery for the camera, and this afternoon we are ordering the quadcore imac, naysayers be damned. I have it on good authority from two editors on two separate coasts that with the i7 processor and the ram bumped up to 8gb, we should have no problem editing. There may be a shark in the water, and maybe we’re in a row boat, but I think my vast knowledge of cupcake baking, picture taking, and costume sewing, are going to get us through just fine. Did I mention I’m learning to dance?