As if the job of an editor wasn’t difficult enough,imagine doing it with one less hand. And your primary hand at that. Well, that is my story. In early June, I was watching TV, got up from my couch and took a step toward the refrigerator. I managed to wedge my left foot under the coffee table and tripped with my right foot trying to take a step. I ended up on the floor with a broken glass in my right hand, and blood on the floor. Alcohol was not involved. That might’ve made it less painful. But at least  it would be a better excuse. No, just ordinary clumsy.

After a night in the ER, a morning hand surgery, and a couple days of recovery, I was back at work, cutting a TV series for Universal. My right hand is currently in a splint and bandage, with doctor’s orders to not use it for several weeks. Well, I couldn’t use my right hand even if I wanted. The splint behind the fingers makes it impossible for them to touch anything, much less a keyboard. Performing ordinary daily tasks without the use of one’s primary hand takes a while to adapt. You can’t carry a cup of coffee and open a door. Shaving seemed a bad idea with my left hand, so I stopped. Tying shoestrings is out of the question. Eating with a fork left-handed is nigh impossible. Like a 4 year old, someone has to cut up my meat. Try going a day without your primary hand, and you will see what I mean.

On the positive side, because of work from my phone, I’m able to edit in my home office, as I did the previous season. My fear in the hospital was the injury would mean I could not work. How would I take notes? How well can I operate a mouse with my left hand? Losing a job during these work stoppages seemed probable, and dreadful.

But I was allowed to hire an assistant editor to be my twohands when necessary. And, it turns out, he can work from home by using Jump Desktop. He can remote into my system while we communicate over telephone, and I have a producer on Evercast during an edit session. (This is a crazy show: I am in north L.A. County, my producer is in central Los Angeles or Massachusetts, my assistant is in Burbank, my post producer is in Santa Monica, there are editors in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, while the production is in the Gold Coast of Australia. Modern film production in the age of the internet).

When I visited the hand surgeon for a follow-up, he removed the eight stitches. Then started putting back the hand splint. “Whoa,” I said. “Can’t I go without the hand splint?” “No,” he responded. If I use my hand over the next six weeks, the tendons and nerves I cut won’t heal correctly. And I would need additional hand surgery. On the bright side, he said, years ago an injury like this would have resulted in amputation of the finger. Yikes! OK, I’ll take the hand splint for a little while longer.

I’ve spent the time since the injury to explore how I can better operate a computer without my right hand. I love learning new things, but ‘editing with only your left hand’ was pretty low on my list of things to learn. Apple’s macOS has a couple of different options for converting voice to text. In the System Preferences, Keyboard settings, you can activate Dictation. By setting up a keyboard shortcut (hit the function key twice, for example) you activate an on screen microphone. Then speak. The text will be typed wherever the cursor is parked.

This will continue converting speech to text until you hit a keystroke. It is reasonably accurate. But it is quite quirky. You do have to speak with better dictation then I generallydo. It can’t distinguish between different words that sound thesame (their, there, they’re). MacOS does some interpretation to insert the correct word. But it gets confused a lot. And, youhave to be able to say complete and coherent sentences, rather than stumble around as I do when trying to write.

The second option is in Accessibility settings. By switching on the Voice Control category, you can not only convert speech to text, but you can give computer commands such  as “Open (file name).” Voice Control displays an on-screen microphone and listens to everything you say. You have to click the Sleep button to turn it off. More than once I have found that I did not turn it off, and it typed a bunch of random text into documents or messages.

Then there is “Sticky Keys,” found also in Accessibility and Keyboard settings. The hardest part of trying to edit with one hand is you can either operate a mouse, or you can type on the keyboard. You can’t do both. Many computer operations require a function key combined with a mouse click. With Sticky Keys turned on, if you double-click the Shift key, it turns on the Shift (Caps Lock) function.

The same with Option, or Command. The only caveat is when you turn on the Shift key (Caps Lock), you have to remember to turn it off, otherwise you are going to get strange results.One problem is Sticky Keys can conflict with other accessibility functions, such as dictation. So, you might be able to dictate, but not use Sticky Keys. Sticky Keys is a pretty good solution, but I thought there should be a better way. So, I went looking for a foot pedal that could mimic a keyboard function key.

I found a very good candidate. It is from X-keys, a company that makes multifunction keyboards. All of their keyboards are programmable, either with their own software or through a macro program such as Keyboard Maestro. I have used several of these in my editing system, programed to save, fade in, fade out, render in-to-out, mute, etc. Turns out, they have a foot pedal with three different switches. So, I ordered one.

And, it didn’t work. I used their software to program the left pedal to mimic a shift key on a standard keyboard. With the macOS built-in software keyboard displayed, I could see that the left pedal was indeed activating Shift for the entire keyboard. But when I begin typing into a document, everything was lowercase. The company that makes the keyboard suggested I try Karabiner-Elements to get this to work, to bypass some of macOS’ security features. Karabiner is designed to allow one to reprogram a Macintosh keyboard. It is often used to create a Hyperkey, combining several function keys to be activated by the Caps Lock key.

Success! After setting up X-keys and Karabiner on an older Intel Mac, the foot pedal activated the Shift key. But duplicating the setup on a newer M1 Mac didn’t. I could see on the software keyboard that it was activating the Shift key, but typed text was all lowercase. I began searching for answers, first at the Karabiner company, who referred me to their GitHub forum, then to an Apple community forum focused on accessibility.

Frustrated, I wanted to see if the foot pedal would simply type a text character. That didn’t work. But strangely, that change in Karabiner programming somehow allowed the foot pedal to work as a Shift key. I have no idea how, but now I’m back editing with a Moviola-like foot pedal. This will be a long process sorting out the best combination of foot pedal, Sticky Keys, Dictation and Voice Commands. Bad news for me is it looks like I’ll have another six weeks to figure this out.

MPEG New Technology Committee
VFX editor Asher Pink and I have been assigned by Motion Picture Editors Guild to lead a technology committee. The committee’s focus is to understand artificial intelligence and machine learning and how it might affect the future of union jobs. We just had our first meeting, where we made a plan to begin researching where the motion picture is heading. I will keep you updated