Our former studio in Los Angeles, circa a few years ago.

The reason we haven’t been posting up here for the past couple of weeks is because we’ve been packing up our home/office/studio and putting it into storage while we buy a new home in the East Mountains section of Albuquerque, just down the Turquoise Trail from Santa Fe. There are many reasons we’re undergoing this major life change, several of which we’ll be elaborating upon in the upcoming weeks and months. If you’re curious, here’s a few of the reasons why:

• Film business moving to New Mexico. Thanks to a strong package of state-funded incentives including a 25% rebate on production costs (plus abundant sunshine and lower cost of living), New Mexico has been very successful in luring film and video work out of California. So far, most of the action has been on the production side, although Sony Imageworks is on the leading edge of more post-production work coming out here as well. The new Albuquerque Studios facility is booked solid, and the new-to-be-constructed Santa Fe Studios will be just up the road from our new home. There is also an established user group community, as well as great conference – motion 08 – which we will be speaking at later this year.

• Decentralization thanks to the internet. Most of our business is now done remotely to our clients. This blog obviously exists in virtual space, as does Lynda.com, who we will be creating more video training content for. Our book publisher Focal Press is headquartered in England; we send PDFs of the final layouts directly to the printer wherever they are. Plus our other writing clients are in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. We’ve also been moving into doing more website development work.

• Artistic expression. As time goes on, we have become more interested in creating graphics and art intended to please ourselves, as opposed to specific clients. Our pursuits include abstract art, collage, photography, printmaking, and calligraphy. Therefore, we expect to be very stimulated living less than an hour away from Santa Fe, the second largest art market in the US, as well as on the outskirts of Albuquerque where the famous Tamarind Institute has fostered an active printmaking community. And on the computer side, we expect to be regular visitors at the University of New Mexico ARTS Lab, which among other things specializes in full-dome projections.

So, this past Monday we packed up our turbocharged PT Cruiser with a pair of laptops, a pair of Mac workstations, two Cinema displays, a gaggle of hard drives, a laser printer, a pair of Airport Extremes plus associated ethernet cables, one of our TiVos, the all-important tea kettle, and a bunch of other stuff (including a few clothes), drove 800 miles due east, and are temporarily set up in an extended-stay hotel while we wait to close escrow on our new home/office/art studio. (By the way, we bought a newer home with half again more square footage on an acre of land in a higher-end subdivision for less than half what we sold our LA-area home for.) We’re really looking forward to this next chapter in our lives and careers – plus a chance to have more time to share information up here on ProVideo Coalition. Stay tuned; more soon.

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