I’ve been involved in digital video for about 8 years now. Yup, it was that long ago that I produced my first little piece on the old Amiga Video Toaster (a product still around today now owned by NewTek) with 2 external 9 gig video drives that a dude basically had to put a second mortgage on his house to buy.
Since then, I’ve used a lot of different stuff. In editing I’ve used Avid (various incarnations), Final Cut (back in the 3.0 days, but even then it was amazing) and these days I like to use Premiere Pro 2.0 (seriously folks, don’t knock it, it’s a huge leap forward from what Premiere used to be. If I was running a Mac desktop, I’d still use Final Cut Pro, but since I like my PC desktop with a Mac laptop setup, Premiere Pro does just fine thank you). In compositing I’ve used Shake, Combustion, After Effects, and Digital Fusion. Hell, I’ve even had to use 3D software from time to time. Mostly Lightwave, but I’ve also dabbled in Maya, 3D Max and Softimage.
Anyway, although I don’t get to work with video as much as I’d like to these days, I still love keeping up with all the new stuff, news and software that keeps popping up. The site I’ve found that I really love reading for that stuff is DVguru. I really recommend it if you like doing home video stuff of any level or kind. It’s setup in a pure blog style format and is a sister site of Cinematical. Go on over and give it a read.
On a side note… has anyone out there tried a beta of the new NewTek editing program SpeedEdit? I’ve been reading about for ages now and I’m dying to try it.
