I was back to using Final Cut 7, the Apple program. So I had gone from using Final Cut on Tetro, to Avid, using Avid on Wolfman, and then now back to Final Cut. Changing from the Steinway to the Bösendorfer, and back again. And, you know, it all... I go through a period, even when I'm not... When I haven't switched pianos, so to speak, if I haven't edited in a while, meaning in a couple of months, a lot of the instant reactions to, what key do I press to make this happen? Goes away on a, kind of, a superficial level. And I call those my 'shoelace' moments, because it's... I have to ask somebody, usually, one of my assistants, 'How do you get from here to there?' Yes, it's that key structure. But it feels like, 'How do you tie your shoelaces? I forgot.'
So, elementary things, I have to relearn. But I haven't really forgotten them, they just don't come to me immediately. So... But once I remember them, then they pretty quickly come back. It usually takes about a week to get back up to speed again. In this case, it was slightly more awkward, because I had to make the transition from another program to... Avid back to Final Cut. And I had been doing this animation in the meantime, which is a completely different system entirely. So it'd been a year at least since I had worked in anything editorial, and almost two years since I had worked with Final Cut. So... But this is just what... This is the world we live in these days. It's... There's lots of changes, and it's very fluid. Unless you have a regular job and you're not working freelance, then you can, kind of, stick with the same program, but that's not, certainly, not what's happening in my case.
