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### Chapter 4: The Regressed PD Is Too Good at Editing
“Good morning~!”
“Uh, uh, uh??? Director Gam!!!”
The entertainment department of MBS Broadcasting Station!
As soon as I barged into the conference room our team frequently used, I saw Writer Kang Ye-rin, a third-year writer,
with her head buried on the conference table.
When I walked in and greeted her, she finally lifted her disheveled head and looked for me.
Like someone who had seen a ghost while half-asleep!
“Ah. It’s morning already. Uh, did you have a busy day yesterday, Director Gam?”
“Yeah. Something came up.”
It wasn’t just busy.
I had almost died.
No, I was still in the middle of it.
‘I’m a terminally ill investor.’
One hundred million won a week.
If I failed to make that much, I would leave this world just like that.
Now that I had returned to my younger days, there was no way I was going to die again right away.
“Drink this.”
I slid something across the table toward Writer Kang Ye-rin as if I were curling.
“Orange… juice?”
“You’ll die young if you only drink caffeine.”
“Director Gam, we have a problem.”
“What?”
“They said you have to make this week’s preview all by yourself!”
“Oh, okay.”
Well, that was within the range of what I had expected.
On a live production team that filmed one week and aired the next, missing even a single day affected the team’s
atmosphere.
‘They could at least let someone rest properly.’
So retaliatory measures like this sometimes happened.
Being dumped with the task of editing a preview was actually pretty cute as punishment.
“The footage is all on the cloud… Wait, no.”
“Huh??”
First, they filmed everything on location.
Then they uploaded the data to online storage.
If it was stored online, then while editing, you could simply connect the editing program on your PC to the cloud and
immediately pull up the footage you needed.
But.
Cloud storage wasn’t widely used at this time.
“No, what about the memory cards?”
“Here.”
Huh.
I hadn’t seen these in a while.
A whole bunch of memory cards were packed inside transparent plastic cases.
On top of that, several more bundles were stacked together with rubber bands.
Seeing something like this did make it feel more professional somehow.
‘To think I’d have to see such primitive technology again.’
At least it was memory cards that I had encountered after regressing.
If I had gone back any further than this?
I might have been carrying around huge rolls of film.
Of course, I had never worked in those days.
The difference between using cloud technology and memory cards?
At a glance,
and for ordinary purposes, there was hardly any difference.
With a memory card, you physically transferred the video onto it, while with the cloud, you transferred it online
without needing to do that.
It didn’t seem like a huge difference.
But if you actually worked with it?
‘This really is primitive technology. So frustrating~.’
Ordinary people or YouTubers generally used maybe one to three cameras at most.
That was normal.
But at a broadcasting station, six cameras were basically the starting point.
There was no smaller unit than that.
There was the main camera that captured the overall situation at a glance,
and if you attached one camera to each cast member, even three people would already mean four cameras.
And could you really film everything from the same horizontal angle?
If someone continued talking for a long time while you kept showing only one side of their face,
viewers would actually feel that something was strange.
That was the magic of editing.
You had to occasionally switch to a shot from the front,
or one showing their side profile,
so that the viewer's brain would perceive it as natural.
If you were watching a drama or variety show and then watched a YouTuber simply stare straight into a single camera, you
might feel that something was different from an actual broadcast.
That was probably the reason.
‘Which means we have to do even more grunt work.’
Once you added several cameras from different distances and angles?
The footage became a complete mess.
Camera 1, Camera 2, Camera 3, all filmed during the exact same time period.
If you extracted all of them, the number of files increased according to the number of cameras.
“You used quite a lot. Twelve cameras.”
Actually, that wasn’t a lot.
Some programs used as many as twenty-five.
Then again, the number of cameras itself was relatively small during this period.
That was because observational variety shows had not yet become a major trend.
I Live Alone was an example of an observational variety show.
Observational variety shows basically started by installing dozens of cameras throughout the house or location being
observed.
Of course, by that era, cloud technology would be running smoothly enough that from the workers’ perspective…
Well, it would still be pretty much the same!
Anyway,
that wasn’t all.
Memory cards had their limits.
With twelve cameras,
multiply that by the number of memory cards swapped out during every break, and naturally you ended up with dozens of
them.
“Ugh. This is giving me cancer.”
You had to review all of them and precisely synchronize the timestamps before editing.
In other words, it was brutally hard, meaningless grunt work.
To find one suitable scene, you had to go through several hours of footage from a dozen or so cameras, recorded over
multiple sessions, until you found the perfect shot.
That was why something like “make the preview by yourself” could be used as punishment.
I still couldn’t understand why they retaliated against someone for taking a perfectly legitimate day off.
Viewers had no idea this kind of grunt work existed.
But surprisingly, this was one of the most important parts of editing.
Adding subtitles and effects wasn’t actually that difficult.
‘They’re still using Final Cut Pro.’
It was an editing program developed by Apple.
It was widely used because it was optimized for reviewing multiple videos simultaneously and finding the footage needed
for editing.
Later on?
The various side applications associated with a program called Premiere Pro became so advanced that the trend shifted.
At this point in time, major broadcasting stations were still using Final Cut.
‘It has been a while, but…’
I had used this program for years after joining the industry.
No, it had actually been the program I used throughout most of my career.
So it felt as natural as breathing.
Tap, tatatadak.
B, I/O, Option + Delete, Command + T, Shift + Z.
Like an athlete competing in some event,
I naturally and rapidly used the shortcut keys, cutting and joining the footage at incredible speed.
“W-wow. Director Gam. You’re really good at editing??”
“Huh? Ah. Well.”
If you did nothing but edit for about five years, you naturally became good at it.
It was basically both the scar and the badge of honor from having lived like an editing slave.
It felt good to do it again after such a long time.
‘Maybe I should have toned down my skills?’
If a first-year PD were editing?
They would probably fumble around, carefully clicking through each function one by one.
So I suppose I might look excessively skilled.
But it wasn’t like I had an editing superpower.
There was no particular reason anyone would suspect me just because I was good at editing.
‘Good grief…’
But Writer Kang Ye-rin was extremely surprised.
The work Director Gam Da-san was doing simply did not look like something the usual Gam Da-san would do.
‘Could he really be this good at editing?? Did he work at an editing company or something?’
“Director Gam, have you ever worked as an editor at a production company?”
“Huh? No. I just played around with it as a hobby.”
“Ah…?”
His skills were far too impressive for that explanation.
There was no one who won a piano competition just because they played the piano as a hobby.
He was a first-year rookie PD, after all.
The fact that he could handle an editing program this well was almost suspicious.
‘He looks like he’s actually playing the piano!’
Swishhhhh~! Tap, tap-tap!
Director Gam Da-san entered various shortcut keys and commands, becoming almost one with the computer.
And he wasn’t just showing off for no reason.
The screen on the monitor changed chaotically in real time according to Director Gam’s movements.
Who would look at this person and think he was a rookie PD with only one year of experience?
‘He wasn’t actually incompetent? Is he some kind of editing genius?’
Writer Kang Ye-rin was genuinely impressed.
Kang Ye-rin was younger than Director Gam Da-san.
But she was in her third year at the broadcasting station.
She had already seen many PDs, including Director Gam Da-san.
There were highly skilled, professional-level PDs among them,
as well as rookie PDs like Gam Da-san.
But.
‘At this level, he seems better than the people on the editing team.’
Even for a rookie PD, it was rare for them to handle all of the editing themselves.
Even on a small team.
For something like a preview, they would generally sketch out the basic concept and send it over.
After all, a preview wasn’t merely about editing.
It was one of the main ways to attract viewers, so the PD determined the overall context of the preview.
That was why broadcasting stations had dedicated editing teams full of editing specialists.
And Kang Ye-rin had encountered numerous professional editors while going in and out of those departments.
But.
‘A rookie would normally spend ages deciding what to put where.’
Director Gam wasn’t merely technically skilled.
He continued editing without hesitation, as naturally as breathing, without seeming to struggle at all with the order or
length of the clips.
It was as if he had a perfect blueprint inside his head,
making it completely unnecessary for him to deliberate.
“A-amazing… Wow. It’s like watching a show.”
“Hahaha. Really?”
“Should we ask them to pull a pilot episode for you? The Director Gam Editing Show. Something like that.”
“Hehehe. Why are you being so cute today? Is it because of the orange juice?”
“Oh, absolutely! If you buy me juice every day, I’ll flatter you every day!”
Writer Kang Ye-rin glanced at Director Gam’s profile for a moment.
He hadn’t taken his eyes off the monitor even for a second.
‘What’s going on? He seems completely different today.’
Director Gam normally had a timid personality.
He was the sort of person who trembled like a nervous egg.
But what was with him today?
Strangely, he seemed relaxed.
Could a person really change this much?
Literally overnight?
He looked almost like someone who had nearly died and been reborn.
“You seem to be in a really good mood today, Director Gam. You keep smiling even though they dumped the editing on you.”
“Because it’s fun.”
There were actually a lot of fun things happening.
Coming back to the past and editing like this brought back all sorts of memories.
‘Not many good memories, though! Damn it.’
But simply being back in this old environment somehow stirred up a strange sense of nostalgia.
And that wasn’t all.
┌─────────────┐
│ Dokdo Beer
│ Purchase Amount: 30,000,000 won
│ Current Value: 44,850,000 won (+49.50%▲)
└─────────────┘
After making 15% yesterday,
today, as soon as the market opened, it had risen another 30%!
In other words, Dokdo Beer had surged by the maximum amount a Korean stock could rise in a single day.
A profit that had reached the upper limit!
This was called “hitting the upper limit.”
‘And the magic of compound interest is already in motion.’
Yesterday’s gain had been 15%,
and today it was 30%,
but the current return wasn’t simply 45%.
The 30% increase was being applied on top of the seed capital that had already increased by 15%.
That brought the total return to more than 49%.
‘The seed money is a little disappointing.’
Today was Tuesday.
The fact that I had regressed on Monday was almost a stroke of incredible luck.
At this rate, including the principal, I could probably get close to 100 million won within a week.
But if that was all I managed,
I would be penniless again starting next week.
“Hmm….”
I carefully thought back over the events of the past.
Was there anywhere I could get more seed money?
After thinking about it for a while…
“There is. Why didn’t I think of that?”
I grabbed my car keys and asked Writer Kang Ye-rin.
“When Director Oh comes, ask him to review what I edited. I’m going out for a little while.”
“What? What? The editing? You mean the preview editing? A-already finished??”
Writer Kang Ye-rin, who was standing there with a plastic cup in one hand and a toothbrush in her mouth, widened her
eyes like a rabbit and glanced at the clock hanging on the wall.
She really was surprised.
“Then I’ll be back.”
“Yes. Yes!”