The February meeting was held at ROGER DERRYBERRY's facility, THE PROJECT STUDIO in Santa Ana.  Our meeting host was CHARLIE GIBBS of CHARLIE GIBBS PRODUCTIONS.

After networking and refreshments provided by the chapter, the meeting began in the studio of The Project Studio.

President BEVERLY TURNER opened the meeting and welcomed the guests, who had the opportunity to introduce themselves.  Upcoming events were announced.

CHARLIE GIBBS gave us an outline of the meeting and introduced DOUG CUNNINGHAM, a Systems Engineer with Apple Computer.  Doug's presentation was mainly about the new and exciting hardware and software that Apple is currently developing.  He covered Mac OS X, and some of it's major improvements such as it's ability to network with PC's, the latest G4's, and something called Xstore (mass storage) which is designed for servers and video media storage.  It is now possible to buy one Gigabyte of storage for only 4 dollars, if you buy it several terabytes at a time.  Doug also told us how "really cool" Final Cut Pro is and that Apple has also acquired several software programs like Shake and Cinema Tools to complete their video editing family of tools.

ROGER DERRYBEERY then welcomed us to his studio and gave us run down of his services and equipment.  He has one of the most complete grip trucks in Orange County.  Roger also has a media center / outdoor theatre thing going on in Bishop.

After that CHARLIE GIBBS had some interesting comments about the state of corporate/industrial video production today.  Like many of us have discovered, with the introduction of some relatively inexpensive editing systems, like Apple's Final Cut Pro, many companies are buying these systems and trying to do video production themselves instead of hiring people like us with experience.  Our job, as a group of media professionals, is to convince video users that it really pays to have a professional do the work..  He suggested that we develop an ad campaign with this in mind.

(Editor's Note:  I couldn't agree more!  Owning an editing system doesn't make anyone a professional video producer any more than owning a wrench makes anyone a professional plumber.)

The raffle, conducted by EMMETT KESEL and BEVERLEY TURNER gave out prizes from DUPLICATION CENTER OF AMERICA, WILD WEST MEDIA, MCA-I (Will we ever run out of those clapboard ITVA calculators?) TRAVIS (a really neat pen that has it's own light), and ELECTRIC PICTURES who had some nice little soft CD holders to give away.

For the grand raffle prize, two copies of Final Draft Professional Screenwriting Software Version 5 were given away.  Final Draft was supplied by Frank Colin at Final Draft. With Final Draft, the only things you'll need to write like the pros are ideas.

John Primm

www.dvpostvideo.com