Isn’t it Byronic, don’tcha think

I realized today that I hadn’t really offered the “more about the trip” thing that I promised earlier, so let me get back on track there.
The funny thing about Byron, Illinois is that, in years past when driving to Green Bay and back again, I had passed the exit to go to Byron about a zillion times. It used to be about a 3-and-a-half hour drive from me – not 11-and-a-half hours. The other funny thing about Byron, Illinois that didn’t occur to me until this morning is that the first guy I even knew who had his own video production business was named Byron (may have been Bryon though – it’s been a long time ago, as in a when-my-mom-was-still-around long time ago). I could go into a “Lucky Wander Boy”-inspired rant about how the signs are coming to pass in great numbers, but I’ll spare you.
The state highway to get to Byron had some beautiful foliage. The trees are already turning there (though as I write this, it’s not even 60 degrees outside my house, so I suspect that’s something Arkansas will soon be sharing with Illinois). The highway goes west for about 10-15 miles, and as you get closer to Byron, two big steaming towers show up in the distance – a nuclear power plant that’s just a little bit south of Byron itself. You come to a stop right next to a bridge over the Rock River, and go north, and you’re in town.
Byron is tiny. As in population 2000-and-something tiny. And yet you can quickly tell just by looking around that this is a city with some money under its belt. The homes are nice. The fire station, where we went to pick up the Avid and other video gear, is far nicer than any city government building I can name in Fort Smith, Arkansas. And yet it’s such a tiny town. (After a bit of research, I found a number of sources pointing out that the property taxes and environmental fees from the nuclear plant are likely the source of Byron’s prosperity.)
At any rate, I walked into the fire station, introduced myself and explained why I was there, and they actually pulled one of their fire engines out of its bay so we could pull around, back in, and load up the gear. Where we had come up with a rather empty cargo area in my wife’s SUV (we folded the back seats down to expand the room for cargo), we were now officially crunched for space. A lot of the gear had wires dangling off of the jacks and ports on the back – everything had been unplugged from one end for transport and that was it. While we were moving stuff, the guy I had spoken to asked what I was going to do with all this gear, and I explained that I fully intended to go into business for myself with it. All he really knew about it was that a past fire chief had gotten the gear to make safety videos (not a bad idea, really), but that everything had been sitting idle for some time since that person had moved on.
After seeing everything in person, I came up with a rough guesstimate that the price tag for all the gear was in the vicinity of $14,000 in 2001 when it was bought. (For those who missed the earlier entry where I showed off the original eBay auction, I reeled the whole package in for $417.05 plus the cost of the trip, which came out to about $200 in fuel.) To put that in perspective, $617 is more than one of my typical paychecks from the station, and it’s almost a house payment. This may have been the steal of the century, but for us, it still wasn’t cheap. So I was understandably disappointed when I went to hook everything up on Sunday morning after we got back, only to find that the PC itself was DOA. (The fix for that problem is already en route.)
What I find both funny and somewhat telling is that folks like Kent and Shane, who I talk to and/or hang out with occasionally, are really eager to drop by and see the new beast in action. That’s rather funny. I don’t know if they’re expecting to see me sitting there marshalling awesome forces of nature and bending them to my will – I hope not. Watching someone else edit video on a computerized nonlinear editing system is like watching walruses make love: you really just wish you could cut the crap, kick the other walrus out of the way, and get on with it. (Okay, maybe not a good analogy.) I get itchy if I have to wait at work for someone else to finish their business with the Avid there because a little voice in my head is screaming I COULD DO THAT SO MUCH FASTER – or it’s screaming something about doing things differently. So I’m not sure what everyone’s hoping to see – like any other medium, coming up with something good on it requires hours and hours of slaving over the machine. Video editing and post is no different. There’s no “Easy” button, and there’s no “Make It Look Like ILM Kissed It” button.
Something else that springs to mind that’s worthy of note: when I returned to work Wednesday, a curious feeling was missing as I stepped into the promo pod. Normally when I return from a vacation or from being out sick for a few days, the Avid’s drives are damn near full, almost so full that it’s not possible to get anything done on it (it seems as though I’m the only person who knows how to fix that). Everything’s been screwed with. It’s intensely frustrating to me, because I feel like I’ve gone and left my baby to be mistreated. I’ve joked openly about how that Avid should be my severance pay someday when I leave, because then it’ll finally be safe from everyone else.
When I came back to work this week, I didn’t feel any of that. Just anticipation for getting my own model working so I can finally get around to making cool stuff. I know that if I go into business for myself with it, my Avid will also be bogged down with plenty of the post-production equivalents of “milk runs” just to keep business coming in, and I’m okay with that. Sometimes having a healthy load of that kind of thing just makes me that much hungrier to do something Really Cool. Just to prove it to myself that I can.
Counting down the days…how long does it take for a motherboard to get here from Canada again?