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MillimeterInterview with David Dessel
Apr 28, 2011 12:51 PM
David Dessel wears many hats. He has been a director, cameraman, editor and After Effects artist for a long time. Working out of his boutique company, Metaphor Pictures in Manhattan, he has worked in many capacities on a wide range of commercials, Webisodes, music videos, corporate videos and just about any other kind of production you can name. Recent projects include spots for National Geographic, a Webisode series for Vaseline and a major production for Dell.
He stresses that clients come to him for his vision and style, not for his use of a particular technology, but he adds that it certainly helps in today's rapidly changing world that he genuinely loves to explore the latest and greatest cameras and post tools as soon as they become available.
"I was an early adopter of RED," he says, "and I work with DSLRs and many other cameras. Over the years, I've owned DV cameras and Betacam. I'm really a camera freak! And I've worked with many different NLEs over the years. I'm obsessed with technology. I love it."
Dessel didn't adopt Adobe Premiere Pro as his NLE of choice overnight. In fact, while he'd been using Adobe After Effects and Photoshop regularly for more than 10 years, he'd mastered most of the NLE software available except Premiere, which he'd first been exposed to years before it included the feature sets and user interface that have redefined the product completely.
He got his first glimpse at the modern Premiere feature set when he used the then-new CS4 for a very specific purpose: He needed to master a Blu-ray Disc, and Premiere offered the solution he needed.
"Then I got a RED ONE camera," he says, "and Premiere in CS4 could edit RED material natively. That was pretty exciting. I still didn't find Premiere the optimal tool to edit with every day, but I experimented with it. I would export QuickTime movies from another NLE into Premiere, and that way I could easily go back and forth if I wanted to do some minor editing and also some After Effects work."
"Then I would bring shots back, one by one," he sighs, "into the other NLE and put them in a folder labeled 'AE Renders' and lay the effects shots out in the proper manner and bring them into my timeline."
For Dessel, the game-changer was seeing blogger Chris Fenwick demonstrate Premiere CS5. Premiere's interface and toolset were finally at a place where Dessel felt he could do some serious editing with it.
"I liked the Mercury Playback Engine and the acceleration I can get with my NVIDIA card," he notes. "I can play .r3d files in real time for clients, and it looks silky smooth. I don't have to do any rendering. I have a Quad Core [Intel] Xeon machine that's nearly three years old. I know I could get even more out of Premiere, but I can still make use of the Mercury Engine, and it's incredibly impressive what it can do even on that computer."
Premiere's ability to work with so many different formats without requiring transcoding is more important to Dessel than ever.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
