// video fusion
On a cold February night in 2009 I was filming an Indian wedding in New Jersey. It had been a very long day and I found myself with nothing to shoot during a three-hour gap that my client had scheduled to break up the events that make up a traditional Indian wedding celebration. While the guests were resting and the bridal party was changing outfits I filmed the entire ballroom table, got my set-up shots of the reception, filmed every possible angle of the venue and was eagerly waiting for the reception to begin.
Having just gone tapeless a few months before, I was beginning to experiment with off-loading my footage from the memory cards to a Macbook Pro I had just purchased. I hadn’t given any thought to producing same-day edits by myself or even sorting through my footage on a wedding day. It was mainly to clear up card space for the long day. I had done a few SDEs in the past but I always had a dedicated editor on-site to capture tapes in real-time who would edit all day long. This was the technology of the time back then.
In my boredom, I started going through my shots, mainly checking for focus and playability, and ensuring I had good material. I did, and a few minutes later I found myself opening Adobe Premiere Pro to see if I could edit some of this footage natively. I was curious to see if Adobe Premiere could handle the footage from my Sony Z5U HDV camcorder in real time. It actually handled the footage with relative ease so I mentally shrugged my shoulders and started trimming down some video clips and placing them on the timeline.
