Save early and save often

Lesson learned: If a pro­gram offers you the oppor­tu­nity to autosave your work for you, if only you’d take the briefest of breaks to first save your work and give it a file name, do it.

Don’t, as I did, work for four hours on a video project, think­ing that Final Cut Pro is sav­ing your work for you and then try to export to a .flv file, only to have FCP freeze up, requir­ing a force quit.

This sit­u­a­tion cost me hours of work yes­ter­day and forced me to recon­struct my video project in 20 min­utes — if only it could go that fast the first time around!

Seriously, a lot of news­pa­per peo­ple hate video because it’s a training-intensive time-sink. Well, it can be, espe­cially if you’re dumb and fail to save early and often.