I found out last week that my producer still had ALL the footage, ALL the After Effects files, ALL the music and ALL the sound effects that I used on the first broadcast doc I edited with Final Cut Pro, THE MEXICAN AMERICAN WAR. The show was hosted by boxing legend Oscar De La Hoya.

What he has basically is the two drives I had for the show. Everything I used on that show is on those drives. So everything is there and intact. The footage for a two hour History Channel special…on two 500GB G-Raids. 840GB total.

The main footage was Varicam shot at 720p24, with a few shots at 760p60 with the intent of slowing it down. The B-Cameras were two HVX-200s. The FIRST TWO HVX-200s on the west coast. And we shot on five 4GB P2 cards for each camera.

This is the show that had me make the move from Avid to FCP. This is the show that actually got me started on this blog…here is the first post. Because when we started out doing this show we (my producer and I) still had Avid workflows in our head…offline/online. With FCP and DVCPRO HD there would be no online. We would store all the footage on firewire drives, at full quality…no problem. We were amazed by that. I am still amazed that all of that footage for that show only adds up to 840GB. Could be the fact that we worked at 23.98fps.

We had LIVE cannon fire…shooting LIVE rounds. We had hand to hand combat with the cameraman in the mix being battered about by the combatants. And I edited this in the garage of my house in Van Nuys, while my producer was in Long Beach. We had no production office.

So I came to ask my producer if he still had the original MXF files of that shoot. He did not, he sent those on a G-Raid to the History Channel. But he did have the entire show still…and he asked if I wanted that.

Hell yes!