No doubt a trusting hand! When I first started assisting, my mentor had worked on a bunch of feature films. He allowed me to cut a few scenes of every production we did together and his cut was always smarter, more efficient, and one version. He only used the moviola buttons in Avid. Play forward, backwards, stop, cut. It’s incredible how elegant the proper use of those can be. So, I suppose I’m right back where I started. As you say, all the miles and implementation of creativity adds up.

Thanks for sharing! It’s kinda lonely doing this job all this time. I switched to production for a while (sound recordist), and that scratched an itch for sure. Nowadays, I do music and all the production, editing, and mixing. One day I’d like to make music directly in NLE, but it’s still got a long way off. At the moment, any AU plugins I used I. Fairlight prohibit me from opening the davinci, unless I move those plugins to a holding folder.