Welcome to 2025.

When this blog went up we all knew it wouldn’t be updated often. Years have gone by. A lot has changed in my personal life, like the fact that I have two kids now. That’s wild to me. Maybe one day they’ll want to learn about their dad and this website will still exist in the Wayback Machine. A lot has also changed in the world. So many things, like:

(list a few ways the world has changed in the past 3 years)

The biggest change that affects anyone who works with a computer in any capacity is AI. I’m writing this. Me. Nick. Typing one letter at a time. Backspacing a lot because my brain is slightly more accurate and much faster than my typing fingers can handle. But what happens if I copy and paste this entire thing into ChatGPT? Well, here’s what you get:

The past three years have been transformative in ways that feel both monumental and surreal. Here are just a few of the ways the world has shifted:

• A global pandemic reshaped how we live, work, and interact, accelerating remote work and virtual connections.

• Climate change became more visible, with record-breaking heatwaves, wildfires, and extreme weather events pushing the conversation into mainstream urgency.

• Social movements surged, advocating for racial justice, gender equality, and broader systemic change in a way that echoed around the globe.

And then, there’s technology—arguably the most relentless change of all.

Artificial intelligence has emerged as a defining force, altering industries, workflows, and even how we express ourselves. While I sit here typing, this moment of self-expression feels uniquely human—raw, imperfect, deliberate. Yet, AI now offers the capability to mirror and enhance such expression with startling proficiency.

Let’s find out what happens when I take this unpolished, human rambling and hand it to ChatGPT:

Ok, it’s me again. A few things. First of all it called my content “unpolished, human rambling” which, personally, I think is fantastic. It also removed any mention of my children. Maybe that’s better for the internet and for the kids themselves. Oh, look, we also have an M dash. Only AI uses those, right? Wrong. They exist because the content that was used to train AI included the M dash, so naturally AI now uses it. To keep with the theme of unpolished, human rambling, I think I’ll just end here without making a point.

It's been well over a year since my last blog post...

…so I thought I’d start writing and see what comes out. Ok, I’m not gonna lie. I’m only writing because I got a new keyboard and I want to hear the click-clacking. It’s soothing. It feels right. It sounds right. I just wish I was actually good at writing things. I want to type, but I have no need to type often. I sit around all day and use keyboard shortcuts, so I guess that’s something. Anyway, let’s see what’s new in the editing world.

Hmm. Not a whole lot? Adobe updated all their programs to 2023 versions. I always jump on these right away (but I still keep the old versions) because it’s fun and interesting to see what’s new, what works, and most importantly, what doesn’t. Editing really hasn’t changed since my last blog post. Actually, I don’t think it’s changed too much at all in the past 100 years. Sure, the way it’s done has changed, but the concepts are still the same. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure Buster Keaton’s visual gags are better than most today.

Welcome to 2021 - Recording and editing video chats are here. It looks bad, it sounds bad - but it doesn’t have to.

I’ve worked on my fair share of these videos since WFH became reality for everyone (no longer just freelancers) and I’ve learned a few things about how to get the most from your video chats.

First off, let’s stop calling them video chats, everyone just says Zoom, whether they’re actually using that platform or not. I feel like Skype really missed an opportunity here. Maybe they were just too early to the game? Trying to do something before the people were ready? Let’s learn from them - if you’re finally ready to start recording and editing Zoom calls, you’re not inventing anything new here. You have limited options, so it didn’t take long to figure out pretty much everything you can figure out about recording and editing this content.

The Zoom platform itself does provide some great options for recording, and from my experience, the quality is much better than Teams. Since I think Zoom is better and I haven’t used Teams as much, let’s just focus on Zoom.

You need their paid account to be able to access all the features. Zoom has a desktop app and a web interface. In the desktop app, there is a little gear icon in the top right, click that, then click Recording along the left column. You should first choose a location where the local files will be saved, then enable these options:

• Record a separate audio file for each participant who speaks

• Optimize for 3rd party video editor

• Record video during screen sharing

Look back at that left column, click on General, then at the bottom of that screen you’ll see “View More Settings” which will open the settings page on their site. Click the Recording tab at the top. With a paid account, you’ll have the options for cloud recording. Here, you’ll want to enable “Record active speaker, gallery view and shared screen separately” and you should also make sure “Display participants’ names in the recording” is disabled.

Now you have it all set up, you’re ready to record! This is where the behind-the-scenes type of stuff comes into play, the things you may not have noticed happening on set when you had a crew with you.

It’s highly recommended to have a producer or director on this chat. They will see and hear things that most clients won’t, and they can think about the edit as the speaker is talking. They can also be another set of eyes while you look at everything in the frame. And can provide valuable insight on what options you have to make it look good. Nitpick the background! Does the camera need to be moved up or down? Tilted in some way? Keep the subjects’ eyes on the top third of the frame. Are they going to look at the camera or are they going to look at the screen? Are they reading something or are they responding to interview questions? How much does that eye bounce bug you when they’re reading (Here’s a tip: If you shrug and say, “Well, it’s not bad,” chances are you’re going to regret that decision when you see the edit, and you’ll wish they were looking at the camera.) If being interviewed, are we also going to see the interviewer in the video? Let’s look at everything in their frame, too, their positioning, their lighting, etc. Speaking of lightning, it’s not uncommon for windows to play a big role as a light source, but keep in mind that the sun sets! If you’re recording in the evenings (or even the late afternoons in the winter) be prepared to lose all of that light. The subject may also have a tree outside their window, so while the sun might still be out, it may change significantly during the recording session.

Once the recording session is over, you can simply share the cloud download link with your editor, or talk to them about how best to transfer the locally recorded files.

---

Here are a few pro-tips from my Zoom editing experience. 

• Airpods provide TERRIBLE audio quality. Like, REALLY bad, AND it’s out of sync. DO NOT USE AIRPODS FOR ZOOM MEETINGS. EVER. A wired gaming headset actually does work really well, but those can look funny, so that’s your call on whether or not to use them.

• Fake backgrounds are fine to hide things that you don’t want to show, but they’re also extremely distracting. I would recommend avoiding fake backgrounds whenever possible. It’s much better to spend a bit of time fixing up the background and/or repositioning the camera to get something that will work better.

• While recording, either keep your camera or or keep your camera off. When the Gallery View video jumps around, your editor is going to have to spend way too much time making things look right when this situation is avoidable by simply doing less.

• Recording the Active Speaker (full screen) vs recording Gallery View (4-up) doesn’t actually make their video better. Sure, it’s bigger but it’s just a punched in version of a low quality video, which is exactly what your editor would be doing if the speaker is sharing the screen with 3 others. It’s actually easier to keep everyone in the same place the entire time, that way your editor can pick and choose who to show, and when to show them. Active Speaker can actually flip to someone else’s camera and lose your speaker if that person makes any noise. Gallery View is what your editor wants.

• Zoom is made to capture the human voice. Try this fun little experiment next time you’re on a call - have someone give you a round of applause (after all, you deserve it if you’ve made it this far into this post.) You may hear the first initial clap, but Zoom will eliminate the rest of the sound automatically since it knows that’s not a human voice. It’s the wrong frequency, it’s too loud, and it’s repetitive. Similarly, singing will come through on Zoom video, but instruments may not.

If you have any specific questions or if you want to discuss working together on your next Zoom edit, click the contact button to send a message and we can schedule our own personal Zoom meeting.

The Right Tools for the Job: An Editor’s Toolbelt

Tongal gave me the opportunity to finally collect a few thoughts on some editing hardware and workflow concepts. It's fairly basic, but let me know if you want to chat about more details! I’ve pasted the post below, but you can view the original article on Tongals site here.

A great idea is the soul of a project. But without the body, the soul cannot extend its reach. Let’s take a look at the brain and the hands — the tools an editor has by way of computer hardware. We’ll hone in on best practices for backups, and take a big-picture look at the hardware being used to bring a story to life. Let’s start at the beginning. You are handed an external drive containing video files. Now what?

Keep It Safe

Losing footage is one of the worst things that could happen through the course of a project. Hard drives fail — that’s inevitable. You need to be ready. I’ve heard countless stories about people editing from an external drive and all of a sudden it stopped working. Poof. Gone. There are data recovery companies, but that can be very expensive and there’s no guarantee you’ll get everything back. Maybe it’s possible to reshoot, but that could be even more expensive. Maybe reshooting is impossible and the whole project ends with nothing. A general rule of thumb is keeping three copies of your footage:

1. Your first copy is the footage you’re working with. Maybe it’s on an internal drive or a fast thunderbolt external.

2. Your second copy should be on a different drive that is easily accessible in case your first one dies. Most people opt for capacity over speed for this. If you’re working at a large studio or post-house, LTO storage is a great option.

3. The third copy should be offsite, which could be another drive that lives in a different building, or a clone of your assets that lives in the cloud. This protects against something physically happening to the drives, such as a fire, or someone breaking in and stealing everything.

A great option for #2 is a network-attached storage server, or NAS. NAS is useful because it’s one storage unit that contains multiple disk drives, and it can be configured as a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) where you can have one disk parity (RAID5) or two disk parity (RAID6), which means one or two disks could fail, but you won’t lose any data. There are services that will automatically backup all data on your NAS (or even your internal drives) to the cloud. Using a service like this will automate #3, storing everything offsite.

Yes, there are associated costs. Purchasing multiple reliable, high capacity drives can be expensive, and/or recurring costs for cloud backups can add up, but it’s almost always cheaper than reshooting. If you can avoid just one incident, the whole thing pays for itself.

Getting into a little more detail, there are RAID units that can directly attach to your computer to work off of, usually through Thunderbolt, but a connection through the network allows separate computers to access the same folders. Most networks aren’t fast enough to allow you to work on a NAS directly, but faster local networks (such as 10 gigabit ethernet) are becoming more and more accessible. This might be something to look into if you’re considering purchasing a NAS solution, especially if you have multiple computers or editors.

Pro Tip: The above applies to your project files as well! You can set your project auto-save location to a different drive than the working project file.

Ok, so now you’re confident that you won’t lose the footage! Time to get creative! But wait… why is this computer going so slow? Ugh, this playback is choppy… saving takes a good 45 seconds… I can’t even watch this clip after I put color correction on it. Wait, what just happened? Where’d everything go? Why is the computer restarting? When was the last time I saved?

Time to look at the computer hardware!

Coke vs. Pepsi

Marvel vs. DC

PC vs. Mac

Each one has their pros and cons. Apple computers are a great one-stop-shop. You know what you’re getting. The customizable components list is short and very straightforward. The Genius Bar can help if something goes wrong. Apple’s monitors are beautiful albeit oversaturated, and the operating system is shiny, but the price-performance ratio is abysmal. On the other hand, shopping for a PC is like going to a restaurant with a 20-page menu. There are way too many options, and it can be overwhelming.

Building a PC is the best bang for your buck, and it’s actually fairly simple. If you’ve never built a PC, there are plenty of resources out there and people love sharing their knowledge about it. Still don’t want to do that? There are some pretty solid pre-built options. Without going into too many specifics, let’s touch on computer hardware and what to look for when building or buying this editing tool. This applies to both Macs and PCs, but with Macs you don’t really get to choose.

CPU

The processor, or CPU, is the central nervous system. The two biggest contenders are AMD and Intel (maybe these two should be added to the epic rivalries list). Both manufacturers make great products, and they refresh their line-up pretty much every year. For the sake of this article, we’re going to keep it simple. At the time of writing, Intel is between their 9000 series and 10000 series, and AMD has their Ryzen 3000 series. If you’re using a higher end consumer model from either of them, you’re fine. This would be the Intel i7 series, and for AMD it would be Ryzen 9. HEDT (High End Desktop) components will cost more, but you’ll see great strides in performance improvement. This would include Intel’s i9 and Ryzen Threadripper lines.

RAM

For editing, more is better. 32GB would be my recommended minimum for a video editing computer. The speed of the RAM has an impact on the overall performance of your computer (by allowing the CPU to access the data on the hard drives more quickly), but is even more essential for editing. In all honesty, I doubt most users will notice a difference between slower or faster RAM for video editing, but everyone will notice a difference between HDDs and SSDs. Keep reading for more information. 

Storage

As mentioned above, a NAS isn’t usually fast enough to edit from, so you should have internal storage on your computer. Solid State Drives (SSDs) are lower capacity, but very fast. Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) are higher capacity, but slower. Using a combination of SSDs and HDDs will let you configure your system to run quickly with the operating system and applications on the SSD, while having large capacity HDDs for media storage. HDDs have spinning disks inside, and you want to make sure you have a drive that will spin at 7200RPM. I strongly recommend staying away from anything that says 5400RPM if you’re trying to edit. For SSDs, you’re already looking at blazing fast speeds, so if you have the budget, NVMe m.2 drives are the craze these days.

GPU

This is the graphics card. Many effects are accelerated with a GPU, and Adobe Premiere embraces the CUDA technology in NVIDIA cards. What does this mean? If you are using any newer NVIDIA GTX or RTX card, Adobe Premiere will work much better. Instead of CUDA, some software prefers OpenCL and/or Metal. AMD Radeon cards do a great job. As with the CPUs, we’re going to keep it simple and say that any newer model will work just fine, with the technical exception that if you’re using Adobe, you’re going to want an NVIDIA card. All new cards have multiple outputs, so you can run multiple monitors at the same time. You can really customize your setup and software layout with more screen real estate.

PSU

PSU stands for Power Supply Unit. This is one of those things that you never have to think about with Apple, you just plug it in and turn it on. But for a PC, the power supply is another component that you need to shop for. The biggest thing I pay attention to when looking for a PSU is reliability. This can make or break your computer — literally. A faulty PSU can cause some really weird issues and troubleshooting any PC issues always starts with troubleshooting the power supply. Any high quality, reputable PSU with a good warranty is what you need. Online reviews are great for this. Just make sure it can output enough power to keep your machine up and running and you’ll be set.

Motherboard

Think of this like the spinal cord. Everything connects to this in order to communicate with everything else. This is another element of a Mac that is invisible. USB 3 is common on all newer motherboards, and Thunderbolt is now officially supported when using an Intel CPU. It’s not “official” for AMD, but there are AMD socket motherboards out there that also have Thunderbolt ports. Unless you’re doing heavy overclocking or have specific needs, whichever new motherboard has the proper socket for your CPU should be sufficient.

Peripherals

Speakers, headphones, mouse, keyboard, monitor, desk… all important things. A 1440p monitor is excellent, but 1080p will suffice. Look for something with great colors since we’re not going to discuss calibrated displays in this article. I love the feel of a good mechanical keyboard, but it’s more expensive (and louder) than a squishy membrane keyboard. Maybe you like a mouse that has customizable buttons — go for it. Want a desk that you can swap between sitting and standing? Those are great. Good speakers and headphones are definitely important. Maybe you need a DAC, but we’ll let the sound engineers take over from here.

Building a powerhouse computer can be expensive, but the more power you get from your system, the quicker you can work and render. Saving time during post production allows you to experiment more with different options. For example, you can spend some time tweaking your color correction and get an accurate representation of your video without having to stop and render after every time you move the slider. The best thing about having a powerful computer is knowing that you’re using something that can handle whatever you can throw at it. Not having to worry about your computer running slow and not having to deal with the computer crashing will keep you in the flow. Nothing is worse than focusing on an edit and having your computer crash, only to lose the last 20 minutes of work you spent on it. This is when confidence goes down the drain and you have to spend the next 20 minutes rebuilding something you already did — and it never quite feels the same.

Conclusion 

Now that our footage is secure, and our computer is up and running, we can finally take a look at this footage! Which software are we going to use? I won’t dig into this portion. As an editor, you’re already familiar with your favorite program. If you’re a director or producer, don’t force an editor to use your favorite software. It’s only another tool at the editor’s disposal that they can use to focus on the story. Using one software over another won’t make your story better, but using something the editor wants to use will help them better tell the story.

These are all tools in our belt. Everything from the computer we’re working on to the cloud backup of footage that runs for hours and hours to save everything off site is just as important as the quality of shots and the concept of your videos. You can’t build a house by simply leaning pieces of drywall together. You need a strong foundation and solid framework before your house can even begin to take shape.

Shoutout and praise to some of my favorite sources for technical discussions:

www.pugetsystems.com

www.reddit.com/r/buildapc

www.pcpartpicker.com

What's with the blog?

Honestly, I’m not much of a blogger.

With that said, I think there are some interesting things that I’ve come across that I’d like to share with people. There aren’t many things I would feel comfortable blogging about. I’m a firm believer that I’m always a student - never a master. I’ll try to keep it related to technology, video production, editing, computer components, things like that… but if whoever reads this would prefer to read posts about coffee, beer, smoking a brisket, or how to make a smash burger, I could also accommodate those types of requests.

Don’t expect this to be a riveting, regularly updated thing. I just wanted a place to collect my own thoughts, some of which others may find interesting.

Feel free to poke around a bit - that’s why this is here. I encourage messages about what I write about. By no means am I always right, and I’m always open for a discussion.

A few of my favorite things