When Bob Mattison called me this summer looking for help with a video editing project, I didn’t realize our work would find its way to the walls of the Loretta Howard Gallery in New York City. As Bob was preparing the materials for the Black Mountain College and Its Legacy exhibit and catalogue, he wanted to include video of the preparations of John Cage’s piano, dances performed by Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller describing several of his project.
After picking up one of the circulating hard drives from Skillman Library, Bob visited a video editing agency to acquire the Final Cut Pro files and video footage of a specialist in Cage’s music, pianist Margaret Leng Tan. Sitting side-by-side at one of the iMacs in Skillman 105, Bob and I meticulously selected the segments of video he wanted for the show. After I spent a few minutes understanding the organization of the Final Cut Pro files I was looking at, we were able to work through the timeline, selecting segments of the video and creating a new sequence that we would export and burn to a DVD.
Because we didn’t have original files for the Merce Cuningham and Buckminster Fuller videos, these required an extra step to digitize the footage using a DVD player connected to the DV deck we usually use to import from tape.
All three of the final edited segments needed to be burned to DVD for use in the gallery. To do this I used DVD Studio Pro to create the disc and adjusted settings so that DVD would auto-play without any menu, and would loop back to the beginning until the disc is ejected.
For more information about the exhibit, read:
Art Professor Robert Mattison Celebrates Liberal Arts Education in New Exhibit