NewEnglandFilm.com

You may not have been aware, but a momentous — dare I say historical — event occurred in Boston last month. I’m talking about something on par with Reagan meeting with Gorbachev, Ford breaking bread with Toyota, or the bullpen at Marvel having lunch with the gang at DC. The second Wednesday of June 2009 witnessed the first joint meeting between the Boston Avid Users Group (BAVUG) and the Boston Final Cut Pro User Group (BOSFCPUG). If you’re saying to yourself, “Uh, so what?” then you are obviously not an editor.

Ask any editor today what they cut on and the answer will either be Avid or Final Cut Pro (FCP). With very few exceptions all features, television shows, documentaries, corporate videos, commercials, and even home movies produced today are edited on one of those two platforms. Occasionally you might hear terms like Premiere Pro, Casablanca, or — if you’re talking to Michael Kahn (Steven Spielberg’s editor since Close Encounters of the Third Kind) — a Steenbeck, but most of the time it’s either Avid or FCP.

For a long time Avid was the big kid on the block, watching competitors like Media 100 and Adobe Premiere come and go. Nothing penetrated Avid’s grip on the growing non-linear editing world. Not until Apple introduced Final Cut Pro. Riding the wave of Apple’s incredible business acumen and the loyal customer base of Mac users, FCP became the first product to go toe-to-toe with the reigning champ and, not only survive, but expand.

Editors are, by our own admission, a solitary group. We sit in dark rooms with no windows for hours, sometimes days on end without seeing another human being. We find sustenance in coffee and M&Ms. Our eyes get red and raw from staring at screens, adjusting cuts over and over and over until every frame is in the perfect place. (Until the producer comes in to ruin everything.) Our social skills suffer. Our sensitivity to sunlight increases. This is the reason that user groups exist.

Boston is unique in that it has organized user groups specific to an editing software. Other user groups in other major cities (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles) have editor user groups that are not software specific and focus broadly on the issues that editors face.

In part one of our coverage, we feature five-time national Emmy nominee, senior editor for WGBH’s FETCH! with Ruff Ruffman, and president of the BAVUG, Arnie Harchik.

There had been an Avid user-group in the early to mid-1990s but it had essentially dissolved by 2000. The group was reborn in 2004 in its current incarnation. The new and improved BAVUG has seen its membership swell and has grown to become one of the most successful user groups around. Although he’s been attending meetings since 2004 and has been on the board since 2006, Harchik has only been president since February. “Suddenly I was the accidental president,” said Harchik. The two big questions he faces each month are, “Where can we meet?” and “What can we talk about?”

The group meets on the second Wednesday of every month except for December, April, and July. They depend on venues to donate a theater or room for the evening. Past meetings have been held at places like Avid Technology, WGBH, National Video, Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts, and a host of others.

Despite the variety of locations, Harchik says that there are basically two kinds of meetings: “One is when we have a third party come to us wanting to do a presentation. The other is the case study.” Harchik likes the case studies the best and feels that they are a better fit for the people coming to the meetings. A presentation can sometimes turn into a glorified sales pitch whereas a case study is a real-world example of an editor showing a sample of his or her work and their individual workflow.

Some past case studies have included Steve Audette, senior editor for Frontline, speaking about the way he uses music and sound in his edits. Other visitors included Don Days, promotions editor for Fox 25, demonstrating how he uses the Avid-DS to put together a 30-second promotion from start to finish, and producer Michael Philips, showcasing the way he and director Frank Kerr used the Avid Media Composer to bring a high-end film look to their low-budget horror short, Jack-in-the-Box.

The case studies, Harchik says, allow people to see, “What other people are doing. What else is happening in town. That’s what great about the user group meetings. It’s a way to stay connected with people.”

Avid Technology had been sponsoring the group, along with a few other corporate sponsors, before the recent economic downturn. One by one they all dropped out, including Avid, and now Rule Broadcast/Boston Camera remains the sole corporate sponsor. In fact, Avid even laid off their user group national liaison.

Another negative resulting from the rotten economy involves the meeting raffle. Every meeting, Avid gave the group some items to give away as part of a random drawing lottery. Everything from caps and T-shirts to bundles of Avid software have been won by editors over the years. The future of raffles at BAVUG is uncertain.

So how did the two superpowers come together to meet? “I think we’re all in agreement that we’re all editors.” Harchik said, “We all have a lot more in common than different.” Indeed, BAVUG had been trying to set up a joint meeting for a while but each group thought the other wasn’t interested. (Just like high school.) But the meet-up was serendipitous: Both the BAVUG and the BOSFCPUG had booked Rule Broadcast as a meeting location for the same night. The two groups saw an opportunity. It was actually Dan Berube, the head of the FCP group, who initially pitched the idea of having a joint meeting to resolve the scheduling conflict. Berube contacted Harchik and all was arranged.

Are the BOSFCPUG meetings similar to the BAVUG? How do the FCP users feel about their product versus Avid? And, what was the first joint meeting like? Tune in next month, same bat-time, same bat-site.