Spend, spend, spend
It’s been over a month since I last put my fingers to the keyboard, largely due to the fact that I’ve not had a proper day off since mid-April. There have been a couple of days without shoots, but they’ve been occupied with intense stints of post-production, car trouble, and family stuff that couldn’t wait. Despite successfully transferring my workload from Durham & Tees Valley to my old colleague James, I’m still working 7 days a week and driving identical distances on a monthly basis. My last 3 months have seen record revenues, and the need for new equipment to stay in the game.
A new computer.
My 2020 IMac was purchsed during the Covid Lockdown of that spring/summer. My credit score was great back then, and I could pretty much finance anything - except Apple products apparently. For some reason, whenever I try to finance stuff from their online store, I’m instantly rejected. At that time I resorted to the Covid bounce-back loan scheme which saved my bacon. That’s all paid back now. The Mac I had was the flagship Intel-based model with upgraded graphics, RAM, and solid state drive. It served me well for 4 years until video work began to stutter considerably. It was time to hand the old girl down to my daughter who is computer-crazy, and upgrade to something for the next four years.
Introducing the 2023 M2-Max Mac Studio and Studio display.
I upped the spec of the integrated graphics, memory, and base SSD capacity and copped for the grand total of just short of five grand. Adding two lightning-fast external drives added another five hundred notes, and a new desk came in at a hundred quid. Once again I tried to finance this over two years, but Apple told me to get stuffed - the bastards. I’d checked my credit score with the three main players beforehand - and was delighted to see a figure of 993 out of a possible maximum of 999. I’ve still no idea what Barclays Partner Finance and Paypal Finance have against me, but they can both piss off as I charged it to my trusty, 40-year-old Barclaycard, and invoked their 3-month interest-free offer. I’ve got the cash to buy it outright, but a 3 month period gives a bit of cashflow relief that works.
So, it took a couple of weeks for the expensive silver box to arrive, and I quickly transferred all data from my old Mac to get up and running. This thing is blazing fast. Working in Lightroom and Photoshop has shown some slight but definite improvements, but nothing dramatic apart from when importing and exporting files. That might change when the next iterations of those apps are introduced. Video editing performance is definitely where the machine shines. There’s no stutter, playback is silky smooth, and rendering/export is proper quick. Backing up to various drives and cloud services has been automated, so it’s shaved another decent portion of time in my editing routine. Always welcome. I moved my office to the dining room, where it’s a bit less claustrophobic than under the stairs in a cupboard, so my evenings of post-production are a bit more relaxed nowadays.
I’m researching methods of further automation via Chat GPT at the moment, so hopefully I’ll be able to cut my admin by a good proportion over the next few weeks. I’ll let you know!
