Editing in Premiere With Gaming Controllers

When it comes to editing, speed can be everything.  Nothing is more powerful (or impressive) than when you can zip through a cut with lightning speed   There are lots of tricks for reprogramming your keyboard to gain that extra efficiency, but I found a better 1, 2 punch team.

Meet the Logitech G13 and the Razer Naga.

Some of the devices created for the gaming world are actually the editor's best friend.  I was initially turned onto the Logitech G13 after hearing how editor Alan Bell (Amazing Spider-Man, Hunger Games: Catching Fire) uses it regularly.  I decided to try it out and the difference in my editing was like night and day.

The keyboard is fully programmable, meaning you can assign whatever key combinations you want to a single button on the keypad, and also make it application dependant.  That means you can have one set of shortcuts for Premiere, another for Avid, another for After Effects, and so on...

Using this device means never moving your left hand from a comfortable rested position and having 60% of your keyboard needs readily available.  It will take awhile to learn muscle memory of where everything is, so I keep a cheat sheet taped to my monitor in case I'm not 100% sure where the buttons I don't use constantly are.

Here below are the shortcuts I setup for working in Premiere.

Once I got up to speed with this keypad, I honestly wondered how I had gone without it for so long.  It's now my #1 tool to take with me to other jobs and an integral part of my studio setup.  I can't recommend it more highly.

The Razer Naga mouse is a more recent edition to my studio.  I saw an Avid panel with editor Eddie Hamilton (Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, Kingsman: The Secret Service) where he showed how the Razer Naga was a big part of his setup and how he was able to work so fast.

The thing that sets the Naga apart from other mice is the 12 button programmable keypad at the thumb.  I said that the G13 covered 60% of my keyboard needs?  Well, meet the other 40%. Below is the current configuration I've got for using the Naga in Premiere.

At first I was worried that having a 12 button grid layout at my thumb with no specific ergonomics to help feel my way around would be more frustrating than helpful, but thankfully I found it's not really the case.  By staggering low/high buttons like zoom and nudge on the outside buttons and placing another function in the middle, it actually became quickly intuitive to use.  So much so that I don't even need a cheat sheet for this mouse taped to my monitor.

So now between these two devices, I'm literally only touching my actual keyboard when I have to name bins or create titles.  With my left and right hand locked on these two controllers, pretty much everything I need to edit is at my finger tips.

There's no hard and fast rules for how to set these things up either.  Use whatever is going to work best for you -- whatever is going to help you work fastest.  If programming in ripple edits is your jam, do that.  These programmable devices are still an evolving process for me too.  Every couple months, I change out a few buttons as I refine what's going to best help me work faster in the way I like to work, but this current button layout so far feels the most solid to me.

The other beauty is both of these devices work equally well with Windows or Mac.  I've used them on both without issue.

Logitech G13 at Amazon

Razer Naga at Amazon

Ashley Lynch's 'Suicide Girl' wins From Our Dark Side genre screenwriting competition

We're very excited to announce that Ashley Lynch is one of five women honoured to be accepted into the From Our Dark Side genre screenplay competition for women sponsored by Women in Film & Television.

Official announcement and profiles of the winners can be found here.

Ashley's script Suicide Girl will go through a development process that will include the input of seasoned industry veterans.  On top of all this awesomeness is the opportunity to attend the Frontieres International Film Market at Fantasia in Montreal.

For now be sure to join the Facebook page for Suicide Girl as we'll be sharing as much about the development process as we can on our path to getting it made.

Why Jessica Jones Matters For Female Creators

On the surface, it would seem like Jessica Jones, the new Netflix series premiering November 20th, would just appear to be more of the same. It’s one more peg in the board of Marvel’s ever expanding cinematic universe and the second of Netflix’s series of Hell’s Kitchen superheroes coming hot off the critical success of Daredevil earlier this year.

So what’s so important about a character most people have never heard of and doesn’t have a cool identity or costume to associate with? Because, Jessica Jones is a superhero series about a woman, written by a women, produced by women and directed by women.

With the amount of attention that’s given these days to almost necessity token crewing on large superhero projects, it’s almost amazing that this slid by so unnoticed, but here it is. Showrunner and writer Melissa Rosenberg has been developing this series for a long time, originally for network TV, before it got moved to the Netflix slate of shows. Liz Friedman who produced a large bulk of Xena is producing here and S.J. Clarkson is directing the first two episodes. In an age where people are still debating about which woman should direct Wonder Woman or lamenting that we don’t have a Black Widow movie, Jessica Jones quietly came along and did everything that every creative woman wanted to have happen — have a genre piece made by women for everyone.

There’s a cruel numbers game that gets played in Hollywood where there’s enough demand for a female driven property to throw a little bit of money at it to see if it sticks, but even greater benefit to the horribly gender disparaged industry to let it crash and burn. Executive producers still love to cite Catwoman and Elektra as examples why female led properties simply cannot work. And female creative professionals often find themselves bumping up against the same barriers with only 16% of working writers, producers and directors being women. So often the attitude is baldly presented that women are incapable of successfully creating genre fare or that women simply lack the desire to.

But Netflix doesn’t have to worry about things like box office or advertisers. Like HBO, it’s beholden only to subscribers and listens to internal viewer metrics and critical response. There is no crash and burn for Jessica Jones, and judging from early critical response, it’s unlikely it will be received as anything other than an unbridled hit by fans and reviewers alike.

So this show is going to be a win in a lot of ways, not just for the fans who get a terrific, adult, inclusive superhero genre series, or even the women who helped make it happen, but for all the rest of us who will be able to point to Jessica Jones as a measure of success that yes — female led genre stories told by women are absolutely viable and that there is an interested audience of all genders.