Introducing New Information:
• A new shot should always present some new information to the viewer. In a motion picture, this may primarily be visual information (a new character / a different location) but it may also be aural (voice over / narration / important sound).
• Editing is one of the most important steps in making a film, it is essential for creating the desired mood, atmosphere and theme wanted by the director. Motivation:
• The new shot you cut to, should provide new information, but so should the shot you are cutting away from - For example, a shot of a man looking in the air in amazement, then the scene cuts to a shot of another man flying.
WHY EDIT?
Shot Composition:
• This is vital in making a scene make sense and keeping a scenes continuity fluent.
• This could be arranging clips in an order that helps the shot keep to the conventions of the genre and of film in general.
• E.g. using the 180 degree rule to help the scene make sense.
Continuity:
• Providing smooth, seamless continuity across transitions is a very important element in an edits.
• Making sure the sequence makes sense throughout, whilst keeping the scene interesting.
EDITING
•All of these conventions can amount to engaging the the viewer, creating motivation, developing drama, and creating pace.
• Overall, combining shot to create sequences gives us the basic term for editing, and doing it correctly can lead to very rewarding results for a film, advert, propaganda, music video etc.
HOW THE FIRST FILMS WERE EDITED
• The earliest films in the in the 1900’s were all done in camera, meaning there was no editing involved, and the entire film was filmed in the order would be seen in theatre, just one reel of film played at once.
• The Great Train Robbery is a 1903 Western film written, produced, and directed by Edwin S. Porter. 12 minutes long, it is considered a milestone in film making.The film used a number of innovative techniques including cross cutting, double exposure composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting.
• Cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique for the time.Some prints
were also hand colored in certain scenes. None of the techniques were original to
The Great Train Robbery, and it is now considered that it was heavily influenced by
Frank Mottershaw's earlier British film A Daring Daylight BurglaryTHE FIRST 3 PEOPLE TO USE EDITING
DAVID GRIFFITH
• Considered the father of narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith practically invented
such techniques like parallel editing, pushing them to unprecedented levels of
complexity and depth.• Griffith's work in the teens was highly regarded by Kuleshov and other Soviet filmmakers and greatly influenced their understanding of editing.
• What became known as the popular 'classical Hollywood' style of editing was developed by early European and American directors, in particular D.W. Griffith in his films such as The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The classical style ensures temporal and spatial continuity as a way of advancing narrative, using such techniques as the 180 degree rule, Establishing shot, and Shot reverse shot.
LEV KULESHOV
• Lev Kuleshov was among the very first to theorize about the relatively young
medium of the cinema in the 1920s. For him, the unique essence of the
cinema — that which could be duplicated in no other medium — is editing. He
argues that editing a film is like constructing a building. Brick-by-brick (shot-byshot) the building (film) is erected. His often-cited Kuleshov Experiment
established that montage can lead the viewer to reach certain conclusions
about the action in a film. Montage works because viewers infer meaning
based on context.• He was a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist who taught at and helped establish the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School.
• Although editing innovations, such as crosscutting were used by directors in Hollywood before him, Kuleshov was the first to use it in the Soviet Russia.
• He studied the techniques of Hollywood directors, particularly D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett and introduced such innovations as crosscutting in editing and montage into Russian cinema.
• Kuleshov remained quiet about this part of his career when he experimented with editing technique. He focused on putting two shots together to achieve a new meaning.
EISENSTEIN
• Sergei Eisenstein was briefly a student of Kuleshov's, but the two
parted ways because they had different ideas of montage. Eisenstein
regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating meaning. By
contrasting unrelated shots he tried to provoke associations in the
viewer, which were induced by shocks.Eisenstein describes five methods of montage in his introductory essay "Word and Image".
1. Metric - where the editing follows a specific number of frames (based purely on the physical nature of time), cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the image. This montage is used to elicit the most basal and emotional of reactions in the audience.
2. Rhythmic - includes cutting based on continuity, creating visual continuity from edit to edit.
3. Tonal - a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots -- not just manipulating the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics -- to elicit a reaction from the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage. For example, a sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation.
4. Over tonal/Associational - the over tonal montage is the accumulation of metric, rhythmic, and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and complicated effect.
5. Intellectual - uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning
THE DEVELOPMENT OF DIGITAL EDITING TECHNOLOGIES AND TECHNIQUES
• Starting in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, several video equipments were introduced such as the TBC – Time Base Correctors and digital video effects units. They operated by using standard analog, it composed the video and then within digitalized it. This made it easier to correct or enhance the video signal.
LINEAR VS NON LINEAR
• In the early days of electronic video production, linear (tape-to-tape) editing was the only way to edit video tapes. Then, in the 1990s, non-linear editing computers became available and opened a whole new world of editing power and flexibility.
• Non-linear editing was not welcomed by everyone and many editors resisted the new wave. In addition, early digital video was plagued with performance issues and uncertainty. However, the advantages of non-linear video eventually became so overwhelming that they could not be ignored.
EDITING HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE
A computer system comprises hardware and software.
Hardware is the physical medium, for example:
• Circuit boards
• Processors
• Keyboards
Software are computer programs, for example:
• Operating system
• Editor
• Compilers
TAPELESS EDITING
Tapeless editing is camcorder that is based on digital recording instead of tape.
These are stored as computer files onto data storage devices such as hard
drives and solid-state flash memory cards.
• Most consumer-level tapeless camcorders use MPEG-2, MPEG-4 video
compression or its derivatives as video coding formats. They are normally
capable of capturing still-images to JPEG formats.Early Editing
Early filmmakers were afraid to edit film shots together, this was because they assumed that splicing different shots together would confuse their audiences. They quickly discovered that editing shots into a sequence enabled them to tell more complex stories and helped the audience have a better understanding. ‘Primitive’ editing can be seen in movies like Rescued By Rover (1904) and The Great Train Robbery (1903). Cuts were made in camera to begin with, so the cameraman would stop filming at the end of a shot, and begin again when it was moved or at the start of the next scene. This could allow for early special effects, including George Méliès who stopped the camera after detonating a puff of smoke in front of the actor, who was moved and then the camera began recording again, creating the special effect of magically vanishing characters.
Moviola
Moviola is a device that allows a film editor to view a film while editing, and was the first one for motion picture editing. Invented by Iwan Serrurier in 1924, the company is still in existence and located in Hollywood. Originally marketed as a home movie projector, though this was too expensive for home use and was later developed into an editing machine. The machine itself allowed editors to study individual frames in their cutting room, this way they could decide more precisely where the best cut would be. Moviolas were the standard for editing, until the 1970s when Flatbed Edit Suites became more popular. Moviola Machines are still used by very high profile filmmakers, including Michael Kahn, who edited Steven Spielberg’sMunich on the Moviola.
Flatbed Edit Suite
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A Flatbed Edit suite is type of editing machine used with motion picture. Images and sound rolls are loaded onto separate plates. Each set of plates moves individually, or they can be locked together to maintain synchronisation between the images and the sound. A prism reflects the images onto a screen, and a magnetic playback head reads the audio tracks. The most common flatbed editors are the six-plate which has one picture transport, two sound transports, and the eight-plate, which has two picture and two sound transports. Most films are shot on a double-system, which is where the sound and picture are recorded on separate machines. The sound is then transferred to a magnetic track (filmstock coated with magnetic oxide). The editor must then synchronize the picture and sound. The rolls are loaded onto the plates and the film and sound is advanced to find when the clapperboard came together. Once both have been located, a mark is made on both of the strips and the flatbed is switched into interlock mode, so both picture and sound rolls move at the same pace to keep them synchronized. When the editor sees a point to cut one shot away to another, he marks is on both strips and makes a cut in both and adds in the next shot. Steenbeck and K-E-M (Keller-Elektro-Mechanik) are the two most common brands of flatbed editors, and both invented in Germany in the 1930s.
Linear and Non-Linear Editing
Linear editing is a post-production process of selecting, arranging and modifying images and sound in a predetermined sequence, (also known as tape-to-tape) it was the only way to edit video tapes to begin with and was used a lot in live TV. In the 1990s, Non-Linear editing (NLE) computers became available and gave a new way of editing. This allowed the original content to not be modified, but the edits themselves are edited by editing software. Each time the audio, video or image is rendered or played back it is copied from the original and editing steps, keeping the original copy safe.
Online and Offline Editing
Offline editing is very similar to Non Linear editing in that it doesn’t modify the original raw footage, it is copied and then edited. The digital revolution has made the process a lot quicker for the editor, as they moved from video tape editing to computer hardware and editing software like Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas. Online editing is the next step, online editors allow an editor to edit video tape recordings using computer software. The protocol used supports different devices like one inch reel-to-reel type C videotapes and videocassette recorders.
The Digital Era:
CMX 600
CMX 600: The first Non-Linear editing system, it was introduced in 1971 by CMX Systems, a joint company of CBS and Memorex, it was referred to as RAVE, or Random Access Video Editor. The 600 had a console with two black and white monitors, as well as a light pen which was used to control the system. The right monitor played the preview video, and was used by the editor to make cuts and to edit decisions by using the light pen to select options, which were over-laid on the image, while the left screen played the edited video. It recorded and played back video in analogue on disk packs the size of washing machines.Edit Droid
The Edit Droid is a computerised analogue NLE system which was developed by Lucasfilm spin-off company, the Droid Works and Convergence Corporation who formed a joint company. It existed through the mid 80’s to the early 90’s. Edit Droid debuted at the National Association of Broadcasters 62nd Annual meeting in 1984, alongside the Montage Picture Processor which would be its competitor for many years. Edit Droid has three screens, one Sun-1 computer display, one small preview video monitor and a large rear-projected monitor containing the cut. It pioneered the use of graphical display for editing introducing the timeline as well as picture icons to identify raw video clips.Avid 1
Avid/1 was based on an Apple Macintosh II computer with special hardware and software designed by Avid installed. By the early 1990s, Avid/1 began replacing machines like the Moviola and Steenbeck flatbed editors, allowing editors to edit easier. The first feature film edited using Avid/1 was Let’s Kill All The Lawyers (1992) directed by Ron Senkowski. By 1994, only three feature films had been edited using Avid/1, by 1995, dozens had made the switch, showing its popularity.
Modern Editing Software
Premier Pro
A timeline based video editing software app, used by BBC and CNN for feature films such as Gone Girl, Captain Abu Raed, and Monsters. Premier Pro’s Plug-ins allows for importing and exporting formats not supported by QuickTime and others, and supports a wide variety of video and audio files.Final Cut Pro
A series of non-linear video editing software developed by Macromedia Inc. and later by Apple, the most recent version runs on Mac OS computers. The software allows the editor to transfer video onto a hard drive to be edited, processed and rendered to a variety of formats.
Bibliography -
constantinou.S. (2012) History and Development of Editing. Available at https://www.slideshare.net/stefan-constantinou/history-and-development-of-editing-14850912 (accessed: 8 september 2019)
Images sourced from :
Avid/1 - screenshot of video Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac1J1bLMucw (accessed: 23rd October 2019)
image available at: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/avid-editing-machine.htm (accessed: 23rd October 2019
Cmx600 - available at: http://www.vtoldboys.com/editingmuseum/offline.htm (accessed: 23rd October 2019)
David griffith - available at:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._W._Griffith (accessed: 23rd October 2019)
Edit droid - available at: http://belowthelinefilm.blogspot.com/2014/07/confessions-of-editor.html (accessed:23rd October 2019)
Eisenstein - available athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Eisenstein (accessed 23rd October 2019)
Flatbed edit suite - available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steenbeck (accessed 23rd October 2019)
Lev Kuleshov - available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Kuleshov (accessed 23rd October 2019)
Premiere pro - Available at : https://larryjordan.com/store/229-adobe-premiere-pro-cc-the-lumetri-color-panel/ (accessed: 23rd October 2019)
Tapeless editing Camera - Available at:https://multimediaevangelist.wordpress.com/2008/09/22/new-sony-hvrz5u-tapeless-hd-video-camera/ (accessed: 23rd October 2019)
The great train robbery - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Train-Robbery-Poster-Movie/dp/B003SMABOC (accessed: 23rd October 2019)
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