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& Gadgets Gear Making life easier without breaking the bank. By Randi Altman Old School: In addition to technology, Conan's Rob Ashe (seen tormenting co-worker Eric McGilloway) finds his mini basketball hoop helps the creative process. 34 Post•January2013 Post0113_034-37-affordableRAV4FINALREAD.indd 34 What are the little things that make your work life a simpler and happier place? For me, it's without a doubt my Wacom Intuos tablet and my iPhone's free recording app. Now, if it would just come with a free transcription tool or a personal assistant who would transcribe for me... But I digress. We all know there are many things in life that don't come with a cost but hold value. MORE THAN GEAR Rob Ashe (@theashetray) is one of three editors working on the Burbankbased Conan O'Brien show on TBS. Duties are typically assigned by speciality, with Ashe doing mock commercials, Dave Grecu working on remote packages and lead editor Dan Dome doing a little bit of everything and overseeing the workflow. When I asked Ashe about some tools he just can't live without, he had some technical offerings and some that were a little more old school. First up, the free tool Kuler from Adobe (kuler.adobe.com). Ashe calls it wor th its weight in gold. "I work with different color schemes a lot on the show and it's tough to find complementary colors for what you are doing at the time. Kuler makes this easy" He used Kuler on a sketch a few weeks back called 3 for 5, based on the big-pot Powerball Lottery. "The concept was, so many people waste money on lottery tickets, why not have this new lottery game that is a guaranteed winner every time. So for a $5 lottery ticket, you are guaranteed to win $3. It had large titles to it and I had to find a lot of complementary colors.When you are dealing with reds in a video, it's tough to find something that's not going to bleed and just fall apart. It's a ridiculously-fast tool." A free iPad app that Ashe finds handy is Ideas, also from Adobe, a touchscreen drawing program. "For a while, every Thursday we'd somewhat change the show open and create a :10 fun animation. So I would use Adobe Ideas to express how I wanted the animation to go. What's cool is I can bring in a still of the standard animation layout and draw on it. You can circle the moon, put an arrow on it and say, 'I want this to go down.' When you are done, you can email what you drew; it helps to make the pitch easier for the graphics guys, who can then put in the real work and do their thing based off whatever suggestion I've given them." The editing team, which famously and humorously bashed FCP X in a video introduced by Conan on the show after its initial release and made a viral video of their happiness with Adobe's Premiere Pro and its www.postmagazine.com 12/21/12 7:23 PM