When I started down the road of Non-Linear editing it was on an EMC2. It was 1994 and the TV Show I was cutting was shot on 16mm film, transferred to Betacam with all the relevant Keycode details etc and then dumped to Low Band U-Matic where the footage was then transferred to optical drives. Each optical drive held about 20 to 25 minutes of footage at that resolution and took a few minutes to load when working on different drives. It was cumbersome and clunky but absolutely magical. The drives were very clinically named after Episode number and reel. Boring, right?

1994: Optical drives, 20 minutes of footage.

I then started working on the original Lightworks with its Steenbeck controller and then subsequently Avid. What followed over the years was a series of interactions with all sorts of NLEs. The DVision (YUCK), the Stratoshphere and Flash systems (UGH), Media 100 (AAARGGHH), Premiere 5.1 (at the time it was great), Canopus which became Edius (loved), Discrete’s Edit (liked), Premiere Pro (Start of the end of the road with my relationship with Premiere Pox), Apple’s Final Cut 6 then 7 then X (FUCKING AWESOME), still Avid (DOUBLE AAARGGHH) and also DaVinci Resolve (love).

In 1999 I started working with the band Marillion. We (myself and a business partner) had spent 4 nights filming the shows put on at the Zodiac in Oxford and the surrounding days filming interviews with the band. We were making our first concert video. Long story short, we had 35 hours of footage on DVCam and no edit suite. A friend who I also freelanced for allowed us to use his Discrete Edit after shutdown at the end of a working day. 6pm til midnight. The other catch was that we agreed to upgrade the 4 gig hard drive storage and include a separate 9gig hard drive for our work. This was a new thing in the NLE world. Storage upgrade. We managed to get all 35 hours of footage onto that hard drive and still have a few gigs to spare. The drive cost 18 000 South African Rands which for me at the time was equivalent to 2 full months of 5 day weeks salary. A major outlay.

1999: 9gig hard drive, 35 hours of footage.

A year later we released our concert video on DVD and with the royalty payments we decided to buy our own edit suite. But what to buy? We had ZAR100K. Hated the DVision and the Media100, Discrete was too expensive. The Avid even more so. What caught my attention was a little known system called Canopus. Mainly dealing with capture cards they developed a tiny piece of editing software but the coup de grace was that the capture cards were compatible with the newly released Premiere 5.1. We could even output to tape for final delivery. It was perfect. So we spent the money on a flashy new computer with 9 gig hard drive and 4 gigs of RAM and the Premiere software and the Canopus capture card. We were free. It was magical.

The edit suite that Marillion built allowed us to start our own production company and we never looked back. Over the next couple of years we grew and added more Canopus suites to our business and homes and eventually I moved away from Premiere when Canopus became Edius and GrassValley took over. I loved working on the Edius system and we were able to add extra hard drives as we grew. We added 2 9gig drives together with a Raid Controller card and thought we had more than enough space to meet our needs. At one point we had a staggering 40 gigabytes which was astonishing to me as we were just 2 people in an office and had a corporate client (a Medical Aid company) who had a million members on their books and their server room only had 32gigs of storage. Mad.

Then USB became a thing and we could use external drives. We were no longer assigned to just having edit suites at the office we could take the drive home and carry on or work on separate projects. It also meant that we had tons of different sized external drives. And hard drive storage space was getting bigger and bigger. Soon we were buying 250gig and 500gig drives and finally when that part of my life imploded we had around 4 terabytes of storage available to us.

2006: 4 terabytes of hard drive space on many varied drives lying around.

With all the external drives we had to find a naming convention that worked and being a boy child most of the drives were named after supermodels. There was Cameron (Diaz), Kate (Beckinsale), Selma (Blair), Tara (Banks) and so on… It was much more fun to say ‘oh the new Marillion music video is on Cameron’ rather than ‘oh the new Marillion music video is on external hard drive number seven.’

Time marched on and the age of the terabyte drive was upon us. Now I was upgrading my old gigabit drives for terabyte drives. In 2010 I joined a production company as Post Supervisor/ Head Editor and we were running productions off 3 terabyte individual external drives copying to the edit suite’s internal 3 terabyte drives which was a mess especially as we were dealing with 3 edit suites all working on the same show. We had to carefully manage drive space and which editor got which drives etc. It was a nightmare.

2010: 3 Terabytes of storage per edit suite.

And then along came RocketStor and the Promise 4600 4 Bay Raid Arrays. We could go from single 3 terabytes to several 9 Terrabytes (Raid5). We ran like that for a couple of years and then HD became a thing and the 9 terabyte drives were upgraded to 12 terabytes and then 18 terabytes and then it was just too crazy and we put in a server with 48 terabytes and linked all the suites together. Naming of drives became a thing of the past and we had one big drive called ‘The big drive’.

2012: 48 terabytes of server storage.

I left that company to start my own post facility in 2015 and in the course of a year where I started with just 1 edit suite and a couple of 9 terabyte 4 bay raids to eventually running 2 suites and a couple of newly minted Netstor 5 bay raids. Rabbit (named after the baddy in CineMax’s Banshee) was filled with 5 6 terabyte WD Purples and ScarFace (named because I dropped the fucking thing getting it out of the box and cracked the front casing) held 5 6 terabyte WD Reds. All while working from a spare room at my home. I eventually added 2 more 4 bay raids from OWC, welcome Loki and Thor to the world. Both filled with 6 terabyte Reds.

2016: 72 terabytes which would whittle back down to 36 terabytes as Rabbit and ScarFace remained in South Africa while I emigrated to Ireland with Loki and Thor.

For the last 7 and a half years I have worked for South Africans, Americans, Brits, French, Nigerian and Irish clients. Thor and Loki have seen retired as Edit Suite Hard Drives and have been assigned to a far more sedate life as Home Cinema Storage Devices. Loki for music and Thor for movies and TV shows. Yeah I know 36 terabytes of home cinema storage. Pussy.

The edit suite up until just this week was running on ScarFace (name nostalgically resurrected) an OWC 4 Bay Thunderbolt 3 with 4 8 terabyte WD Reds, Sod’em (I was working on a show called Gomora, geddit?), then there was Lulu (Interior Lulu a Marillion song) who held all my showreel media, Stuff (well it held all sorts of work and home stuff) and Roxanne (the whore because she would take anything I threw at her). A new show prompted an upgrade and so I bought a new QNAP TR4 bay (named Thunderbirds, as the show I was working on was called GO!). It was filled with 4 6 terabyte WD Reds and I ran out of space on that and added a 14 terabyte drive called R GO. They shot the fucking show on a Sony Venice at full bitrate. 6 episodes 42 terabytes. Ouch. Then A funny thing happened and I was tasked with becoming the head editor on a series of feature films shot in South Africa and the writing was on the wall. Time for a major overhaul of drive storage.

Enter Octavious an 8 Bay Thunderbolt 4 OWC Raid (named after Doc Ock, him of 8 arms from the Spider-Man comics) filled with 8 10 terabyte Seagate Exos drives, A new QNAP TR4 called KrayTor (named after the 4 armed Marvel comic villian) filled with 4 6 terabyte Reds recycled from the original Thunderbirds box and now used to store all the older single drives (Lulu, Stuff and Roxanne.) I upgraded ScarFace with 4 14 terabyte Seagate Ironwolf Pros and upgraded Thunderbirds 6 terabyte drives with the older 8s from ScarFace. All Raid 5 setups. Sod’em is still around but will be upgraded from its measly but more than adequate to its job requirement of 4 terabytes to 8 terabytes in the near future.

2024: 158 terabytes of storage. At home in my box room from my little seaside town on a little island straddling the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish Sea.

And it’s magical. Just like Tahiti.

Peace love and vomit.

J