Life is full of patterns…we live by them and a good videojournalist sees and uses them. It’s all good. Positive. Um…not always.

Part of patterning is doing stuff in a certain way – a set way. Do it often enough and your body can go through the motions without the brain having to actively participate. Like driving a car – your foot finds the brake without you having to think it through. And eating…the fork finds its way to the mouth without the brain actively telling the hand to grasp the fork, the arm to extend to the plate, etc.

Right now my brain is attempting to break out of more than ten years of patterning created by using Final Cut Pro and Express. And those have been a good ten years…when the brain is freed from the nitty gritty of how to do tasks, it can focus on the story and thinking ahead to the next one or twenty edits.

Enter Adobe Production Pro with Premeire Pro. Just close enough in many ways so that I was able to do basic drag and drop edting on day one. But now I’m trying to play catch-up and do some REAL editing. Motion, fades, superfine detailed stuff. And while my body is aching to follow the old patterns, I’m attempting to teach it some new patterns. For starters, I’ve had to go from touchpad to mouse…needed some way to break loose because the touchpad on the new laptop is smaller and off center and I KEPT MISSING IT WHEN I TRIED TO USE IT. Wow…something as basic as that. My old patterns were aiming at a MacBook touchpad that wasn’t there.

I guess it’s like a phantom limb…when you lose an arm or leg, but still (in your mind) try to use it. Oh well…could be worse. I could be trying to walk through walls…