I'm David Schlaepfer, a video editor based in Santa Cruz,CA. On this site you can watch my work, look at my photos, or read my blog below. 👇
Interested in talking? Send me an email!
Hope everyone has a nice Christmas Eve. :)
Went to Barceloneta in downtown Santa Cruz the other night. Really really great food all around, but the highlight was dessert: Vanilla ice cream topped with olive oil and salt. 🤤 Such a simple tweak… I see much of this in my future.
Current status: “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays” bumpin in Dolby Atmos while I crank out one last edit for December. 🎧👌
So perfectly captures the timing and cadence of the comic strips. I love that it doesn’t make a massive deal out of punchlines. The joke lands, Vince keeps grooving underneath and we move on to the next three-panel gag. It’s sublime.
Was talking with a friend about The Grand Budapest Hotel and came up with what I call the WATI (Wes Anderson Tolerance Index).
Weights your ratings of his films/shorts/ads based on runtime and averages the scores out. I have a relatively high WATI of 0.83.
Feel free to make a copy the Google Sheet and track your own WATI here.
iOS pull-down search is weird… sometimes if I type in “Photos” the only recommendation is to download the Google Photos app. But if I type in “Pho” I get the Photos app as a top hit.
At this point, the obsession over IP’s has been digging so deep that studios are pulling obscure IP’s out from decades ago that no one has ever heard of, which completely negates the original point of doing reboots and remakes of old IP’s in the first place. It’s just cringey and desperate feeling and I’m embarrassed on their behalf when I see it.
What’s even crazier is the amount of execs I’ve met that don’t want to do this (all of them). I’m constantly told by execs that lament about how they wish they could make original stuff and not IP’s, but that their hands are tied. None of us got into this business so that we could remake old stuff. We didn’t watch some movie as an 8-year-old and say “When I grow up, I want to make this same exact movie but for a modern, four-quadrant audience, and as the jumping off point for an extended universe of films.” No one wants to do this, but for some reason, everyone in charge feels forced to.
I mean aren’t we all starting to laugh at and get bored by “universes”? It’s alienating at this point, and a turn off, when you know that a movie or show you’re watching is just there to set up some other movie or season you’re supposed to watch later. You can really feel it in what you’re watching and it just feels gross. Let’s just make things we wanna watch now with an actual ending, then we won’t feel gross when we watch stuff and can just sit and enjoy it!
I think it’s a huge, joyless loss that an entire generation of artists are having their original, unique, and timely voices shifted almost entirely into the IP mines. A loss that I feel won’t be seen or understood fully for at least a decade, but when it happens, will feel like we’re missing an entire part of our collective souls.
In my video editing work, sometimes I need to make sure two videos match up perfectly, frame to frame. This could be for a variety of reasons, but today it was because I was conforming an edit that was done in Premiere Pro, to finish it with color and audio in DaVinci Resolve. “Conforming” encompasses a lot of things, but for my purposes it basically means, “Did this timeline make it ok from one program to the other? Did anything break? Are all the shots lining up?
I usually start by firing off an export from the original app as a reference video, and lay that reference video on top of my imported timeline in Resolve. Then, I change its blend mode to “Difference.” That does exactly what you’d think – it highlights the differences between the top and bottom clips in the timeline. So when I watch back the program, I should hope to see nothing but blackness, because everything matched up perfectly, right? …right?
Shoot. Here I had a clip that used Premiere’s “Modify → Interpret Footage” workflow for slow motion, something that doesn’t carry over via XML to Resolve1. So I slowed my 30 FPS clip down to 80% and started slipping it left and right, frame by frame, until the most satisfying moment:
Ahhhh.
Conforming can be an annoying, frustrating experience at times, so I think it’s important to take a bit of joy in moments like these. Plus, sometimes clips with Difference blending that are slightly off sync can yield some cool results when in motion:
If you’re still using this workflow, I highly recommend just learning to slow things down in the timeline by percentages. ☺️ There’s a whole bunch of issues in Premiere related to using Modify → Interpret Footage for slow mo. If you edit in Final Cut you’re lucky because there’s a command for automating that! Search for “Automatic Speed” in the keyboard shortcut customization window and bask in Apple’s occasional rightdoing with FCPX. ↩︎
It’s still fall even if I’m listening to Christmas music. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Criterion added a slew of films to its streaming site for Sony Pictures Classics’ 30th anniversary. There are a few in here I’ve seen but a lot more I’ve been waiting to see. On my watchlist:
If I get around to watching them (which is tough as a new parent working full-time and going into the holidays), I’ll be logging them on my Letterboxd account. (I wonder if there’s a Letterboxd → Micro.blog crossposting tool?)
If you aren’t yet acquainted with Big Thief and by extension Adrianne Lenker, I suggest you have some acquaintin’ to do. They make delightful music that walks the line between folk & rock & electronic & country & most of the subgenres within. Their latest album has been on my rotation all year. Plus it has the dorkiest cover.
When I first heard them I was like “Yeah whatever, you’re sort of pitchy.” But now they’re one of the few bands I call myself a fan of.
A few of my favorites:
And a handful from Adrianne:
I was born too late to know the height of blogs in the mid-00s. However I have seen Julie & Julia and I do have delusions of grandeur. So here I am. Where once I simply tweeted my thoughts into the abyss, I shall now blog them furiously into an even abyssier abyss. I’ll probably regret it 👍
Hoping to blog about all sorts of things. Whatever’s interesting to me, I guess. I imagine it’ll mostly revolve around video editing, which I do for a living. I also enjoy taking photos for fun, but I wouldn’t say I’m a photographer. Similarly, I’ve recently been making a simple app for the Playdate called The Drawing Board, but I’m definitely not a developer. I love hearing developers talk tho, and love using beautiful apps. Currently, I’m typing this in Ulysses, which I haven’t cracked open since college. It’s refreshing. :)
See ya ✌️
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olympus xa, kodak max 400
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