ALACRITY MEDIA

Longtime video industry pioneer

Blair Paulsen has worked on the cutting edge of technology for many years. He and his company Alacrity Media bought their first desktop video editing solution from ProMax back in 1997, just a few short years after ProMax was founded in 1994. He started out with an Adobe Premiere configured system on a beige G3 Macintosh computer using external SCSI drives for video storage. Fast forward to 2007 and he is now starting to shoot and edit video shot with the revolutionary 4K RED ONE™ video camera and is hard to be found without his Intel-based MacBook Pro in tow. Blair is now busier than ever working at a successful company in an industry he loves for over a decade, but it was several years into his career before he put his formal studies to use and aligned his career accordingly.

HIS JOURNEY BEGAN IN 1985

Blair received his Film and Television degree in 1985 from the University of Utah, but opted to pursue a job as a magazine editor. His dream was to open up his own production company, but back then it was generally prohibitively expensive to get into the video industry for a start-up business. The technology needed to produce and edit video - cameras, decks, editing hardware - had a high barrier to entry due to the extensive costs involved. Proprietary non-linear editing systems were just surfacing at Lucasfilm and non-linear editing was very much in its infancy. Commercially available desktop computer-based editing systems as we know them today did not make their appearance until later that decade.

BLAIR AND PROMAX WORK TOGETHER ON THE CUTTING EDGE OF TECHNOLOGY

Within several years Blair saw his opportunity to get into the video industry and embraced what would become the DV revolution with open arms. Blair picked up one of Sony's VX1000 camcorders, the first prosumer MiniDV 3-chip digital video camera with a built-in iLink connection, better known today as FireWire. He then enlisted ProMax to help him navigate the kludge that was the early days of Adobe Premiere editing with beige Macintosh computers and external SCSI drives. He knew the piece pulling it all together was ProMax's FireMAX FireWire capture card and DVSoft software, which enabled him to capture video digitally directly from his Sony camcorder.  He had ProMax build a system for him and came to appreciate the tech support included with the package in short order, withstanding the umpteen versions of the DVSoft software released by ProMax and Brad Pillow of PillowSoft as the bugs were worked out of this early workflow. The nuances of working on the cutting edge with all of these burgeoning technologies required patience, but it was an exciting time. It didn't bother Blair too much as he was able to immediately see the potential of this relatively inexpensive all-digital workflow.

THE EARLY DAYS OF FINAL CUT PRO

Blair continued to evolve with the technology and became an early Final Cut Pro adopter in 1999 when the first version was released. He upgraded his system to a blue and white G3 Macintosh that came with an extra 25GB hard drive and TurboMAX card for just under 2 hours of video storage, also installed by ProMax. The TurboMAX card, an award-winning host bus adapter, saved Blair lots of money by facilitating the additional inexpensive ATA drives fast enough for DV video capture. This was a bold move away from the external SCSI drives that were the stalwarts of storage in most editing suites of that time.

OPUS TAKES THE STAGE

Today, we see the continuing progression of Blair and Alacrity Media. He still uses Macintosh computers and Final Cut Pro is his editing software of choice, but he now uses a versatile AJA Kona card that gives him the ability to work with pretty much any video format he may find himself needing to capture for his clients. He also got himself a RED ONE‚Ñ¢ camera (serial #0019, to be exact) that he has affectionately nicknamed "Opus". This 4K-resolution camera from the RED Digital Cinema Camera Company has revolution written all over it, and he's' in the catbird's seat once again.

Click here to read about Blair's RED WORKFLOW