130-400: Film editing is both a creative and a technical part of the post-production process of filmmaking . The term is derived from the traditional process of working with film which increasingly involves the use of digital technology . When putting together some sort of video composition, typically, you would need a collection of shots and footages that vary from one another. The act of adjusting
260-433: A multimedia computer for non-linear editing of video may have a video capture card to capture analog video or a FireWire connection to capture digital video from a DV camera, with its video editing software. Various editing tasks could then be performed on the imported video before export to another medium , or MPEG encoded for transfer to a DVD . Modern web-based editing systems can take video directly from
390-587: A China Mission Station , made around the same time in 1900. The first shot shows the gate to the mission station from the outside being attacked and broken open by Chinese Boxer rebels , then there is a cut to the garden of the mission station where a pitched battle ensues. An armed party of British sailors arrived to defeat the Boxers and rescue the missionary's family. The film used the first " reverse angle " cut in film history. James Williamson concentrated on making films taking action from one place shown in one shot to
520-415: A Telescope , in which the main shot shows street scene with a young man tying the shoelace and then caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an old man observes this through a telescope. There is then a cut to close shot of the hands on the girl's foot shown inside a black circular mask, and then a cut back to the continuation of the original scene. Even more remarkable was James Williamson 's Attack on
650-508: A balance between literal continuity and perceived continuity. For instance, editors may condense action across cuts in a non-distracting way. A character walking from one place to another may "skip" a section of floor from one side of a cut to the other, but the cut is constructed to appear continuous so as not to distract the viewer. Early Russian filmmakers such as Lev Kuleshov (already mentioned) further explored and theorized about editing and its ideological nature. Sergei Eisenstein developed
780-415: A camera phone over a mobile connection, and editing can take place through a web browser interface, so, strictly speaking, a computer for video editing does not require any installed hardware or software beyond a web browser and an internet connection. Nowadays there is a huge amount of home editing which takes place both on desktop and tablets or smartphones. The social media revolution has brought about
910-408: A certain range of image editing operations to the raw image format provided by a photographer or an image bank. There is a range of proprietary and free and open-source software, running on a range of operating systems available to do this work. The first of post-production usually requires loading the raw images into the post-production software. If there is more than one image, and they belong to
1040-676: A closeup of a hand pulling a fire alarm. The film comprised a continuous narrative over seven scenes, rendered in a total of nine shots. He put a dissolve between every shot, just as Georges Méliès was already doing, and he frequently had the same action repeated across the dissolves. His film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), had a running time of twelve minutes, with twenty separate shots and ten different indoor and outdoor locations. He used cross-cutting editing method to show simultaneous action in different places. These early film directors discovered important aspects of motion picture language: that
1170-399: A coherent sequence. The job of an editor is not simply to mechanically put pieces of a film together, cut off film slates or edit dialogue scenes. A film editor must creatively work with the layers of images, story, dialogue, music, pacing, as well as the actors' performances to effectively "re-imagine" and even rewrite the film to craft a cohesive whole. Editors usually play a dynamic role in
1300-406: A console with two monitors built in. The right monitor, which played the preview video, was used by the editor to make cuts and edit decisions using a light pen . The editor selected from options superimposed as text over the preview video. The left monitor was used to display the edited video. A DEC PDP-11 computer served as a controller for the whole system. Because the video edited on the 600
1430-424: A cut, the subsequent cuts are supervised by one or more producers, who represent the production company or movie studio . There have been several conflicts in the past between the director and the studio, sometimes leading to the use of the " Alan Smithee " credit signifying when a director no longer wants to be associated with the final release. The final cut is the last stage of post-production editing and represents
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#17330853521491560-406: A desktop editor based on its proprietary compression algorithms and off-the-shelf parts. Their aim was to democratize the desktop and take some of Avid's market. In August 1993, Media 100 entered the market, providing would-be editors with a low-cost, high-quality platform. Around the same period, other competitors provided non-linear systems that required special hardware—typically cards added to
1690-417: A discontinuous sequence for stylistic or narrative effect. The technique of continuity editing, part of the classical Hollywood style, 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 embraces temporal and spatial continuity as a way of advancing the narrative, using such techniques as
1820-415: A film usually takes longer than the actual shooting of the film. It can take several months to complete, because it includes the complete editing, color correction, and the addition of music and sound. The process of editing a movie is also seen as the second directing, because through post-production it is possible to change the intention of the movie. Furthermore, through the use of color grading tools and
1950-409: A film. Editors possess a unique creative power to manipulate and arrange shots, allowing them to craft a cinematic experience that engages, entertains, and emotionally connects with the audience. Film editing is a distinct art form within the filmmaking process, enabling filmmakers to realize their vision and bring stories to life on the screen. According to writer-director Preston Sturges : [T]here
2080-500: A higher truth, synthesis. He argued that conflict was the basis of all art, and never failed to see montage in other cultures. For example, he saw montage as a guiding principle in the construction of " Japanese hieroglyphics in which two independent ideographic characters ('shots') are juxtaposed and explode into a concept. Thus: He also found montage in Japanese haiku , where short sense perceptions are juxtaposed and synthesized into
2210-494: A new meaning, as in this example: (枯朶に烏のとまりけり秋の暮) — Matsuo Basho As Dudley Andrew notes, "The collision of attractions from line to line produces the unified psychological effect which is the hallmark of haiku and montage." Continuity editing, developed in the early 1900s, aimed to create a coherent and smooth storytelling experience in films. It relied on consistent graphic qualities, balanced composition, and controlled editing rhythms to ensure narrative continuity and engage
2340-399: A noted Russian actor and intercut the shot with a shot of a bowl of soup, then with a child playing with a teddy bear, then with a shot an elderly woman in a casket. When he showed the film to people they praised the actor's acting—the hunger in his face when he saw the soup, the delight in the child, and the grief when looking at the dead woman. Of course, the shot of the actor was years before
2470-410: A number of other cloud-based editors have become available including systems from Avid , WeVideo and Grabyo . Despite their reliance on a network connection, the need to ingest material before editing can take place, and the use of lower-resolution video proxies , their adoption has grown. Their popularity has been driven largely by efficiencies arising from opportunities for greater collaboration and
2600-578: A particular one, and still keep his data secure. The Optima software editing system was closely tied to Acorn hardware, so when Acorn stopped manufacturing the Risc PC in the late 1990s, Eidos discontinued the Optima system. In the early 1990s, a small American company called Data Translation took what it knew about coding and decoding pictures for the US military and large corporate clients and spent $ 12 million developing
2730-407: A period of time (hours, days or even months) and combined into a narrative whole. That is, The Great Train Robbery contains scenes shot on sets of a telegraph station, a railroad car interior, and a dance hall, with outdoor scenes at a railroad water tower, on the train itself, at a point along the track, and in the woods. But when the robbers leave the telegraph station interior (set) and emerge at
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#17330853521492860-412: A quarter of a second, one will get a jolt. There is one other requirement: the two shots must be approximate of the same tone value. If one cuts from black to white, it is jarring. At any given moment, the camera must point at the exact spot the audience wishes to look at. To find that spot is absurdly easy: one has only to remember where one was looking at the time the scene was made. Assistant editors aid
2990-409: A series of short shots that are edited into a sequence to condense narrative. It is usually used to advance the story as a whole (often to suggest the passage of time), rather than to create symbolic meaning. In many cases, a song plays in the background to enhance the mood or reinforce the message being conveyed. One famous example of montage was seen in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey , depicting
3120-406: A serious competitor to entry-level Avid systems. Another leap came in the late 1990s with the launch of DV-based video formats for consumer and professional use. With DV came IEEE 1394 (FireWire/iLink), a simple and inexpensive way of getting video into and out of computers. Users no longer had to convert video from analog to digital—it was recorded as digital to start with—and FireWire offered
3250-496: A set, ideally post-producers try to equalize the images before loading them. After that, if necessary, the next step would be to cut the objects in the images with the Pen Tool for a perfect and clean cut. The next stage would be cleaning the image using tools such as the healing tool, clone tool, and patch tool. The next stages depend on what the client ordered. If it is a photo montage, the post-producers would usually start assembling
3380-414: A significant change in access to powerful editing tools or apps, at everyone's disposal. When videotapes were first developed in the 1950s, the only way to edit was to physically cut the tape with a razor blade and splice segments together. While the footage excised in this process was not technically destroyed, continuity was lost and the footage was generally discarded. In 1963, with the introduction of
3510-541: A standard computer running a software-only editing system. Avid is an industry standard used for major feature films, television programs, and commercials. Final Cut Pro received a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award in 2002. Since 2000, many personal computers include basic non-linear video editing software free of charge. This is the case of Apple iMovie for the Macintosh platform, various open-source programs like Kdenlive , Cinelerra-GG Infinity and PiTiVi for
3640-436: A straightforward way to transfer video data without additional hardware. With this innovation, editing became a more realistic proposition for software running on standard computers. It enabled desktop editing, producing high-quality results at a fraction of the cost of earlier systems. In early 2000, the introduction of highly compressed HD formats such as HDV has continued this trend, making it possible to edit HD material on
3770-1312: A system of editing that was unconcerned with the rules of the continuity system of classical Hollywood that he called Intellectual montage . Alternatives to traditional editing were also explored by early surrealist and Dada filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel (director of the 1929 Un Chien Andalou ) and René Clair (director of 1924's Entr'acte which starred famous Dada artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray ). Filmmakers have explored alternatives to continuity editing, focusing on graphic and rhythmic possibilities in their films. Experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner have used purely graphic elements to join shots, emphasizing light, texture, and shape rather than narrative coherence. Non-narrative films have prioritized rhythmic relations among shots, even employing single-frame shots for extreme rhythmic effects. Narrative filmmakers, such as Busby Berkeley and Yasujiro Ow, have occasionally subordinated narrative concerns to graphic or rhythmic patterns, while films influenced by music videos often feature pulsating rhythmic editing that de-emphasizes spatial and temporal dimensions. The French New Wave filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut and their American counterparts such as Andy Warhol and John Cassavetes also pushed
3900-447: A wrong cut or needed a fresh positive print, it cost the production money and time for the lab to reprint the footage. Additionally, each reprint put the negative at risk of damage. With the invention of a splicer and threading the machine with a viewer such as a Moviola , or "flatbed" machine such as a K.-E.-M. or Steenbeck , the editing process sped up a little bit and cuts came out cleaner and more precise. The Moviola editing practice
4030-414: Is a law of natural cutting and that this replicates what an audience in a legitimate theater does for itself. The more nearly the film cutter approaches this law of natural interest, the more invisible will be his cutting. If the camera moves from one person to another at the exact moment that one in the legitimate theatre would have turned his head, one will not be conscious of a cut. If the camera misses by
Film editing - Misplaced Pages Continue
4160-426: Is an opportunity for the editor to shape the story and present their vision of how the film should unfold. It provides a solid foundation for further collaboration with the director, allowing them to assess the initial assembly and provide feedback or guidance on the creative direction. When shooting is finished, the director can then turn his or her full attention to collaborating with the editor and further refining
4290-434: Is attributed to British film pioneer Robert W. Paul 's Come Along, Do! , made in 1898 and one of the first films to feature more than one shot. In the first shot, an elderly couple is outside an art exhibition having lunch and then follow other people inside through the door. The second shot shows what they do inside. Paul's 'Cinematograph Camera No. 1' of 1896 was the first camera to feature reverse-cranking, which allowed
4420-659: Is in contrast to 20th-century methods of linear video editing and film editing . In linear video editing, the product is assembled from beginning to end, in that order. One can replace or overwrite sections of material but never cut something out or insert extra material. Non-linear editing removes this restriction. Conventional film editing is a destructive process because the original film must be physically cut to perform an edit. A non-linear editing approach may be used when all assets are available as files on video servers , or on local solid-state drives or hard disks , rather than recordings on reels or tapes. While linear editing
4550-545: Is non-linear, allowing the editor to make choices faster, a great advantage to editing episodic films for television which have very short timelines to complete the work. All film studios and production companies who produced films for television provided this tool for their editors. Flatbed editing machines were used for playback and refinement of cuts, particularly in feature films and films made for television because they were less noisy and cleaner to work with. They were used extensively for documentary and drama production within
4680-664: Is properly labeled, logged, and stored in an organized manner, making it easier for the editor to access and work with the materials efficiently. Assistant editors serve as a bridge between the editing team and other departments, facilitating communication and collaboration. They often work closely with the director, editor, visual effects artists, sound designers, and other post-production professionals, relaying information, managing deliverables, and coordinating schedules. Often assistant editors will perform temporary sound, music, and visual effects work. The other assistants will have set tasks, usually helping each other when necessary to complete
4810-546: Is reconstructed from the original source and the specified editing steps. Although this process is more computationally intensive than directly modifying the original content, changing the edits themselves can be almost instantaneous, and it prevents further generation loss as the audio, video, or image is edited. A non-linear editing system ( NLE ) is a video editing (NLVE) program or application, or an audio editing (NLAE) digital audio workstation (DAW) system. These perform non-destructive editing on source material. The name
4940-426: Is safer, and is overall more efficient. Color grading is a post production process, where the editor manipulates or enhances the color of images, or environments in order to create a color tone. Doing this can alter the setting, tone, and mood of the entirety of scenes, and can enhance reactions that would otherwise have the possibility of being dull or out of place. Color grading is vital to the film editing process, and
5070-481: Is still the most-used NLE on prime-time TV productions, being employed on up to 90 percent of evening broadcast shows." Since then the rise in semi-professional and domestic users of editing software has seen a large rise in other titles becoming very popular in these areas. Other significant software used by many editors is Adobe Premiere Pro (part of Adobe Creative Cloud ), Apple Final Cut Pro X , DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks . The take-up of these software titles
5200-480: Is technology that allows editors to enhance a story. Today, most films are edited digitally (on systems such as Media Composer , Final Cut Pro X or Premiere Pro ) and bypass the film positive workprint altogether. In the past, the use of a film positive (not the original negative) allowed the editor to do as much experimenting as he or she wished, without the risk of damaging the original. With digital editing, editors can experiment just as much as before except with
5330-481: Is that editing gives filmmakers the power to control and manipulate the temporal aspects of storytelling in film. Between graphic, rhythmic, spatial, and temporal relationships between two shots, an editor has various ways to add a creative element to the film, and enhance the overall viewing experience. With the advent of digital editing in non-linear editing systems , film editors and their assistants have become responsible for many areas of filmmaking that used to be
Film editing - Misplaced Pages Continue
5460-445: Is the temporal relation between shot A and shot B. Editing plays a crucial role in manipulating the time of action in a film. It allows filmmakers to control the order, duration, and frequency of events, thus shaping the narrative and influencing the audience's perception of time. Through editing, shots can be rearranged, flashbacks and flash-forwards can be employed, and the duration of actions can be compressed or expanded. The main point
5590-485: Is the use of filters and adjusting the lighting in a shot. Film editing contributes to the mise en scene of a given shot. When shooting a film, you typically get shots from multiple angles. The angles at which you shoot from are all part of the film's mise en scene. In motion picture terminology , a montage (from the French for "putting together" or "assembly") is a film editing technique. There are at least three senses of
5720-455: Is tied to the need to sequentially view film or hear tape, non-linear editing enables direct access to any video frame in a digital video clip , without having to play or scrub/shuttle through adjacent footage to reach it, as is necessary with video tape linear editing systems. When ingesting audio or video feeds, metadata is attached to the clip. That metadata can be attached automatically ( timecode , localization, take number, name of
5850-477: Is to an extent dictated by cost and subscription licence arrangements, as well as the rise in mobile apps and free software. As of January 2019 , Davinci Resolve has risen in popularity within professional users and others alike - it had a user base of more than 2 million using the free version alone. This is a comparable user base to Apple's Final Cut Pro X , which also had 2 million users as of April 2017 . Some notable NLEs are: Early consumer applications using
5980-422: Is typically referred to as mixing and can also involve equalization and adjusting the levels of each individual track to provide an optimal sound experience. Contrary to the name, post-production may occur at any point during the recording and production process. Non-linear editing system Non-linear editing is a form of offline editing for audio , video , and image editing . In offline editing,
6110-437: Is unique to film. Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was quoted as saying: "I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of filmmaking. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing a film to edit." Film editing is significant because it shapes the narrative structure, visual and aesthetic impact, rhythm and pacing, emotional resonance, and overall storytelling of
6240-456: The 180 degree rule , Establishing shot , and Shot reverse shot . The 180-degree system in film editing ensures consistency in shot composition by keeping relative positions of characters or objects in the frame consistent. It also maintains consistent eye-lines and screen direction to avoid disorientation and confusion for the audience, allowing for clear spatial delineation and a smooth narrative experience. Often, continuity editing means finding
6370-507: The Ampex Editec, videotape could be edited electronically with a process known as linear video editing by selectively copying the original footage to another tape called a master . The original recordings are not destroyed or altered in this process. However, since the final product is a copy of the original, there is a generation loss of quality. The first truly non-linear editor, the CMX 600 ,
6500-681: The American Dream , which won a National Primetime Emmy Award for Editing in 1993. The NewTek Video Toaster Flyer for the Amiga included non-linear editing capabilities in addition to processing live video signals. The Flyer used hard drives to store video clips and audio, and supported complex scripted playback. The Flyer provided simultaneous dual-channel playback, which let the Toaster's video switcher perform transitions and other effects on video clips without additional rendering . The Flyer portion of
6630-472: The Avid Media Composer was most often used for editing commercials or other small-content and high-value projects. This was primarily because the purchase cost of the system was very high, especially in comparison to the offline tape-based systems that were then in general use. Hard disk storage was also expensive enough to be a limiting factor on the quality of footage that most editors could work with or
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#17330853521496760-561: The Avid/1 (and later Media Composer systems from the late 1980s) was somewhat low (about VHS quality), due to the use of a very early version of a Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) codec. It was sufficient, however, to provide a versatile system for offline editing. Lost in Yonkers (1993) was the first film edited with Avid Media Composer, and the first long-form documentary so edited was the HBO program Earth and
6890-479: The BBC's Film Department. Operated by a team of two, an editor and assistant editor, this tactile process required significant skill but allowed for editors to work extremely efficiently. Modern film editing has evolved significantly since it was first introduced to the film and entertainment industry. Some other new aspects of editing have been introduced such as color grading and digital workflows. As mentioned earlier, over
7020-630: The Beaver ". By 1985 it was used on over 80% of filmed network programs and Cinedco was awarded the Technical Emmy for "Design and Implementation of Non-Linear Editing for Filmed Programs." In 1984, Montage Picture Processor was demonstrated at NAB. Montage used 17 identical copies of a set of film rushes on modified consumer Betamax VCRs. A custom circuit board was added to each deck that enabled frame-accurate switching and playback using vertical interval timecode. Intelligent positioning and sequencing of
7150-613: The Betamax system. All of these original systems were slow, cumbersome, and had problems with the limited computer horsepower of the time, but the mid-to-late-1980s saw a trend towards non-linear editing, moving away from film editing on Moviolas and the linear videotape method using U-matic VCRs. Computer processing advanced sufficiently by the end of the 1980s to enable true digital imagery and has progressed today to provide this capability in personal desktop computers. An example of computing power progressing to make non-linear editing possible
7280-618: The EDL (without having to have the actual film data duplicated). Generation loss is also controlled, due to not having to repeatedly re-encode the data when different effects are applied. Generation loss can still occur in digital video or audio when using lossy video or audio compression algorithms as these introduce artifacts into the source material with each encoding or re-encoding. codecs such as Apple ProRes , Advanced Video Coding and mp3 are very widely used as they allow for dramatic reductions on file size while often being indistinguishable from
7410-449: The EDLs, the editor can work on low-resolution copies of the video. This makes it possible to edit both standard-definition broadcast quality and high definition broadcast quality very quickly on desktop computers that may not have the power to process huge full-quality high-resolution data in real-time. The costs of editing systems have dropped such that non-linear editing tools are now within
7540-606: The EMC2 editor, a PC-based non-linear off-line editing system that utilized magneto-optical disks for storage and playback of video, using half-screen-resolution video at 15 frames per second. A couple of weeks later that same year, Avid introduced the Avid/1, the first in the line of their Media Composer systems. It was based on the Apple Macintosh computer platform ( Macintosh II systems were used) with special hardware and software developed and installed by Avid. The video quality of
7670-447: The Eidos system had no requirement for JPEG hardware and was cheap to produce. The software could decode multiple video and audio streams at once for real-time effects at no extra cost. But most significantly, for the first time, it supported unlimited cheap removable storage. The Eidos Edit 1, Edit 2, and later Optima systems let the editor use any Eidos system, rather than being tied down to
7800-587: The Linux platform, and Windows Movie Maker for the Windows platform. This phenomenon has brought low-cost non-linear editing to consumers. The demands of video editing in terms of the volumes of data involved means the proximity of the stored footage being edited to the NLE system doing the editing is governed partly by the capacity of the data connection between the two. The increasing availability of broadband internet combined with
7930-592: The M-JPEG data rate was too high for systems like Avid/1 on the Apple Macintosh and Lightworks on PC to store the video on removable storage. The content needed to be stored on fixed hard disks instead. The secure tape paradigm of keeping your content with you was not possible with these fixed disks. Editing machines were often rented from facilities houses on a per-hour basis, and some productions chose to delete their material after each edit session, and then ingest it again
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#17330853521498060-559: The Video Toaster/Flyer combination was a complete computer of its own, having its own microprocessor and embedded software . Its hardware included three embedded SCSI controllers. Two of these SCSI buses were used to store video data, and the third to store audio. The Flyer used a proprietary wavelet compression algorithm known as VTASC, which was well regarded at the time for offering better visual quality than comparable non-linear editing systems using motion JPEG . Until 1993,
8190-562: The addition of music and sound, the atmosphere of the movie can be heavily influenced. For instance, a blue-tinted movie is associated with a cold atmosphere. The choice of music and sound increases the effect of the scenes shown to the audience. In television, the phases of post-production include: editing, video editing, color correction, assembly, sound editing, re-recording, animation and visual effects insertions, combining separately edited audio and video tracks back together and delivery for broadcast. Professional post-producers usually apply
8320-532: The amount of material that could be held digitized at any one time. Up until 1992, the Apple Macintosh computers could access only 50 gigabytes of storage at once. This limitation was overcome by a digital video R&D team at the Disney Channel led by Rick Eye . By February 1993, this team had integrated a long-form system that let the Avid Media Composer running on the Apple Macintosh access over seven terabytes of digital video data. With instant access to
8450-471: The audience that they were watching a film), and by the overt use of jump cuts or the insertion of material not often related to any narrative. Three of the most influential editors of French New Wave films were the women who (in combination) edited 15 of Godard's films: Francoise Collin, Agnes Guillemot, and Cecile Decugis, and another notable editor is Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte , the first black woman editor in French cinema and editor of The 400 Blows . Since
8580-427: The audience. For example, whether an actor's costume remains the same from one scene to the next, or whether a glass of milk held by a character is full or empty throughout the scene. Because films are typically shot out of sequence, the script supervisor will keep a record of continuity and provide that to the film editor for reference. The editor may try to maintain continuity of elements, or may intentionally create
8710-471: The bad bits" and string the film together. Indeed, when the Motion Picture Editors Guild was formed, they chose to be "below the line", that is, not a creative guild, but a technical one. Women were not usually able to break into the "creative" positions; directors, cinematographers, producers, and executives were almost always men. Editing afforded creative women a place to assert their mark on
8840-510: The center of the frame, playing with color differences, and creating visual matches or continuities between shots. The second dimension is the rhythmic relationship between shot A and shot B. The duration of each shot, determined by the number of frames or length of film, contributes to the overall rhythm of the film. The filmmaker has control over the editing rhythm by adjusting the length of shots in relation to each other. Shot duration can be used to create specific effects and emphasize moments in
8970-533: The clip) or manually (players names, characters, in sports). It is then possible to access any frame by entering directly the timecode or the descriptive metadata. An editor can, for example, at the end of the day in the Olympic Games , easily retrieve all the clips related to the players who received a gold medal. The non-linear editing method is similar in concept to the cut and paste techniques used in IT . However, with
9100-464: The computer system. Fast Video Machine was a PC-based system that first came out as an offline system, and later became more online editing capable. The Imix video cube was also a contender for media production companies. The Imix Video Cube had a control surface with faders to allow mixing and shuttle control. Data Translation's Media 100 came with three different JPEG codecs for different types of graphics and many resolutions. DOS -based D/Vision Pro
9230-453: The content of their images are cut against each other to create a new meaning not contained in the respective shots: Shot a + Shot b = New Meaning c. The association of collision montage with Eisenstein is not surprising. He consistently maintained that the mind functions dialectically, in the Hegelian sense, that the contradiction between opposing ideas (thesis versus antithesis) is resolved by
9360-423: The course of time, new technology has exponentially enhanced the quality of pictures in films. One of the most important steps in this process was transitioning from analog to digital filmmaking. By doing this, it gives the ability editors to immediately playback scenes, duplication and much more. Additionally digital has simplified and reduced the cost of filmmaking. Digital film is not only cheaper, but lasts longer,
9490-513: The cut of the film. This is the time that is set aside where the film editor's first cut is molded to fit the director's vision. In the United States, under the rules of the Directors Guild of America , directors receive a minimum of ten weeks after completion of principal photography to prepare their first cut. While collaborating on what is referred to as the "director's cut", the director and
9620-478: The definitive version of the film. It is the result of the collaborative efforts between the director, editor, and other key stakeholders. The final cut reflects the agreed-upon creative decisions and serves as the basis for distribution and exhibition. Mise en scene is the term used to describe all of the lighting, music, placement, costume design, and other elements of a shot. Film editing and Mise en scene go hand in hand with one another. A major part of film editing
9750-502: The different images into the final document, and start to integrate the images with the background. In advertising, it usually requires assembling several images together in a photo composition. Types of work usually done: Techniques used in music post-production include comping (short for compositing, or compiling the best portions of multiple takes into a single composite take), timing and pitch correction (perhaps through beat quantization ), and adding effects . This process
9880-433: The editing process in other art forms such as poetry and novel writing. Film editing is an extremely important tool when attempting to intrigue a viewer. When done properly, a film's editing can captivate a viewer and fly completely under the radar. Because of this, film editing has been given the name “the invisible art.” On its most fundamental level, film editing is the art , technique and practice of assembling shots into
10010-439: The editor and director in collecting and organizing all the elements needed to edit the film. The Motion Picture Editors Guild defines an assistant editor as "a person who is assigned to assist an Editor. His or her duties shall be such as are assigned and performed under the immediate direction, supervision, and responsibility of the editor." When editing is finished, they oversee the various lists and instructions necessary to put
10140-405: The editor go over the entire movie in great detail; scenes and shots are re-ordered, removed, shortened and otherwise tweaked. Often it is discovered that there are plot holes , missing shots or even missing segments which might require that new scenes be filmed. Because of this time working closely and collaborating – a period that is normally far longer and more intricately detailed than
10270-590: The editor has full control over. The first dimension is the graphic relations between a shot A and shot B. The shots are analyzed in terms of their graphic configurations, including light and dark, lines and shapes, volumes and depths, movement and stasis. The director makes deliberate choices regarding the composition, lighting, color, and movement within each shot, as well as the transitions between them. There are several techniques used by editors to establish graphic relations between shots. These include maintaining overall brightness consistency, keeping important elements in
10400-399: The editor to sometimes cut in temporary music, mock up visual effects and add temporary sound effects or other sound replacements. These temporary elements are usually replaced with more refined final elements produced by the sound, music and visual effects teams hired to complete the picture. The importance of an editor has become increasingly pivotal to the quality and success of a film due to
10530-463: The editor's cut is the first. An editor's cut (sometimes referred to as the "Assembly edit" or "Rough cut") is normally the first pass of what the final film will be when it reaches picture lock . The film editor usually starts working while principal photography starts. Sometimes, prior to cutting, the editor and director will have seen and discussed " dailies " (raw footage shot each day) as shooting progresses. As production schedules have shortened over
10660-419: The entire preceding film production – many directors and editors form a unique artistic bond. The goal is to align the film with the director's artistic vision and narrative objectives. The director's cut typically involves multiple iterations and discussions until both the director and editor are satisfied with the overall direction of the film. Often after the director has had their chance to oversee
10790-486: The film into its final form. Editors of large budget features will usually have a team of assistants working for them. The first assistant editor is in charge of this team and may do a small bit of picture editing as well, if necessary. Assistant editors are responsible for collecting, organizing, and managing all the elements needed for the editing process. This includes footage, sound files, music tracks, visual effects assets, and other media assets. They ensure that everything
10920-465: The film. For example, a brief flash of white frames can convey a sudden impact or a violent moment. On the other hand, lengthening or adding seconds to a shot can allow for audience reaction or to accentuate an action. The length of shots can also be used to establish a rhythmic pattern, such as creating a steady beat or gradually slowing down or accelerating the tempo. The third dimension is the spatial relationship between shot A and shot B. Editing allows
11050-434: The filmmaker to construct film space and imply a relationship between different points in space. The filmmaker can juxtapose shots to establish spatial holes or construct a whole space out of component parts. For example, the filmmaker can start with a shot that establishes a spatial hole and then follow it with a shot of a part of that space, creating an analytical breakdown. The final dimension that an editor has control over
11180-434: The filmmaking process. The history of film has included many women editors such as Dede Allen , Anne Bauchens , Margaret Booth , Barbara McLean , Anne V. Coates , Adrienne Fazan , Verna Fields , Blanche Sewell and Eda Warren . Post-production editing may be summarized by three distinct phases commonly referred to as the editor's cut , the director's cut , and the final cut . There are several editing stages and
11310-399: The footage completely transferred to a computer hard drive. When the film workprint had been cut to a satisfactory state, it was then used to make an edit decision list (EDL). The negative cutter referred to this list while processing the negative, splitting the shots into rolls, which were then contact printed to produce the final film print or answer print . Today, production companies have
11440-408: The late 20th century Post-classical editing has seen faster editing styles with nonlinear, discontinuous action. Vsevolod Pudovkin noted that the editing process is the one phase of production that is truly unique to motion pictures. Every other aspect of filmmaking originated in a different medium than film (photography, art direction, writing, sound recording), but editing is the one process that
11570-428: The limits of editing technique during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s. French New Wave films and the non-narrative films of the 1960s used a carefree editing style and did not conform to the traditional editing etiquette of Hollywood films. Like its Dada and surrealist predecessors, French New Wave editing often drew attention to itself by its lack of continuity, its demystifying self-reflexive nature (reminding
11700-451: The making of a film. An editor must select only the most quality shots, removing all unnecessary frames to ensure the shot is clean. Sometimes, auteurist film directors edit their own films, for example, Akira Kurosawa , Bahram Beyzai , Steven Soderbergh , and the Coen brothers . According to “Film Art, An Introduction”, by Bordwell and Thompson, there are four basic areas of film editing that
11830-495: The many time-sensitive tasks at hand. In addition, an apprentice editor may be on hand to help the assistants. An apprentice is usually someone who is learning the ropes of assisting. Post-production Post-production is part of the process of filmmaking , video production , audio production , and photography . Post-production includes all stages of production occurring after principal photography or recording individual program segments. The traditional first part of
11960-485: The multiple roles that have been added to their job. Early films were short films that were one long, static, and locked-down shot. Motion in the shot was all that was necessary to amuse an audience, so the first films simply showed activity such as traffic moving along a city street. There was no story and no editing. Each film ran as long as there was film in the camera. The use of film editing to establish continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another,
12090-518: The narrative. By 1900, their films were extended scenes of up to five minutes long. Other filmmakers then took up all these ideas including the American Edwin S. Porter , who started making films for the Edison Company in 1901. Porter worked on a number of minor films before making Life of an American Fireman in 1903. The film was the first American film with a plot, featuring action, and even
12220-643: The next day to guarantee the security of their content. In addition, each NLE system had storage limited by its fixed disk capacity. These issues were addressed by a small UK company, Eidos Interactive . Eidos chose the new ARM -based computers from the UK and implemented an editing system, launched in Europe in 1990 at the International Broadcasting Convention . Because it implemented its own compression software designed specifically for non-linear editing,
12350-549: The next shown in another shot in films like Stop Thief! and Fire! , made in 1901, and many others. He also experimented with the close-up, and made perhaps the most extreme one of all in The Big Swallow , when his character approaches the camera and appears to swallow it. These two filmmakers of the Brighton School also pioneered the editing of the film; they tinted their work with color and used trick photography to enhance
12480-405: The option of bypassing negative cutting altogether. With the advent of digital intermediate ("DI"), the physical negative does not necessarily need to be physically cut and hot spliced together; rather the negative is optically scanned into the computer(s) and a cut list is confirmed by a DI editor. In the early years of film, editing was considered a technical job; editors were expected to "cut out
12610-399: The original content is not modified in the course of editing. In non-linear editing, edits are specified and modified by specialized software. A pointer-based playlist, effectively an edit decision list (EDL), for video and audio, or a directed acyclic graph for still images, is used to keep track of edits. Each time the edited audio, video, or image is rendered, played back, or accessed, it
12740-572: The other shots and he never "saw" any of the items. The simple act of juxtaposing the shots in a sequence made the relationship. Before the widespread use of digital non-linear editing systems , the initial editing of all films was done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film workprint (cutting copy in UK) by physically cutting and splicing together pieces of film. Strips of footage would be hand cut and attached together with tape and then later in time, glue. Editors were very precise; if they made
12870-421: The post-production process, non-linear (analog) film editing, has mostly been replaced by digital or video editing software , which operates as a non-linear editing (NLE) system. The advantage of non-linear editing is the ability to edit scenes out of order, thereby making creative changes at will. This flexibility facilitates carefully shaping the film in a thoughtful, meaningful way for emotional effect. Once
13000-675: The potential for cost savings derived from using a shared platform, hiring rather than buying infrastructure, and the use of conventional IT equipment over hardware specifically designed for video editing. As of 2014 , 4K Video in NLE was fairly new, but it was being used in the creation of many movies throughout the world, due to the increased use of advanced 4K cameras such as the Red Camera . Examples of software for this task include Avid Media Composer , Apple's Final Cut Pro X , Sony Vegas , Adobe Premiere , DaVinci Resolve , Edius , and Cinelerra-GG Infinity for Linux. As of 2019 8K video
13130-472: The production team is satisfied with the picture editing, the editing is said to be locked . At this point the turnover process begins, in which the picture is prepared for lab and color finishing, and the sound is spotted and turned over to the composer and sound designers for sound design, composing, and sound mixing. Post-production consists of many different processes grouped under one name. These typically include: The post-production phase of creating
13260-428: The reach of home users. Some editing software can now be accessed free as web applications ; some, like Cinelerra (focused on the professional market) and Blender , can be downloaded as free software ; and some, like Microsoft 's Windows Movie Maker or Apple Inc. 's iMovie , come included with the appropriate operating system. The non-linear editing retrieves video media for editing. Because these media exist on
13390-446: The responsibility of others. For instance, in past years, picture editors dealt only with just that—picture. Sound, music, and (more recently) visual effects editors dealt with the practicalities of other aspects of the editing process, usually under the direction of the picture editor and director. However, digital systems have increasingly put these responsibilities on the picture editor. It is common, especially on lower budget films, for
13520-617: The same film footage to be exposed several times and thereby to create super-positions and multiple exposures . One of the first films to use this technique, Georges Méliès 's The Four Troublesome Heads from 1898, was produced with Paul's camera. The further development of action continuity in multi-shot films continued in 1899–1900 at the Brighton School in England, where it was definitively established by George Albert Smith and James Williamson . In that year, Smith made As Seen Through
13650-426: The screen image does not need to show a complete person from head to toe and that splicing together two shots creates in the viewer's mind a contextual relationship. These were the key discoveries that made all non-live or non live-on-videotape narrative motion pictures and television possible—that shots (in this case, whole scenes since each shot is a complete scene) can be photographed at widely different locations over
13780-457: The shot footage of an entire movie , long-form non-linear editing was now possible. The system made its debut at the NAB conference in 1993 in the booths of the three primary sub-system manufacturers, Avid, Silicon Graphics and Sony . Within a year, thousands of these systems had replaced 35mm film editing equipment in major motion picture studios and TV stations worldwide. Although M-JPEG became
13910-421: The shots you have already taken, and turning them into something new is known as film editing. The film editor works with raw footage , selecting shots and combining them into sequences which create a finished motion picture . Film editing is described as an art or skill, the only art that is unique to cinema, separating filmmaking from other art forms that preceded it, although there are close parallels to
14040-512: The source decks provided a simulation of random-access playback of a lengthy edited sequence without any re-recording. The theory was that with so many copies of the rushes, there could always be one machine cued up to replay the next shot in real time. Changing the EDL could be done easily, and the results seen immediately. The first feature edited on the Montage was Sidney Lumet's Power . Notably, Francis Coppola edited The Godfather Part III on
14170-427: The source material can be edited on a computer using any of a wide range of video editing software . The end product of the offline non-linear editing process is a frame-accurate edit decision list (EDL) which can be taken, together with the source tapes, to an online quality tape or film editing suite. The EDL is then read into an edit controller and used to create a replica of the offline edit by playing portions of
14300-424: The source tapes back at full quality and recording them to a master as per the exact edit points of the EDL. Editing software records the editor's decisions in an EDL that is exportable to other editing tools. Many generations and variations of the EDL can exist without storing many different copies, allowing for very flexible editing. It also makes it easy to change cuts and undo previous decisions simply by editing
14430-418: The standard codec for NLE during the early 1990s, it had drawbacks. Its high computational requirements ruled out software implementations imposing extra cost and complexity of hardware compression/playback cards. More importantly, the traditional tape workflow had involved editing from videotape, often in a rented facility. When the editor left the edit suite, they could securely take their tapes with them. But
14560-582: The start of man's first development from apes to humans. Another example that is employed in many films is the sports montage. The sports montage shows the star athlete training over a period of time, each shot having more improvement than the last. Classic examples include Rocky and the Karate Kid. The word's association with Sergei Eisenstein is often condensed—too simply—into the idea of "juxtaposition" or into two words: "collision montage," whereby two adjacent shots that oppose each other on formal parameters or on
14690-452: The system, and Stanley Kubrick used it for Full Metal Jacket . It was used on several episodic TV shows ( Knots Landing , for one) and on hundreds of commercials and music videos. The original Montage system won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 1988. Montage was reincarnated as Montage II in 1987, and Montage III appeared at NAB in 1991, using digital disk technology, which should prove to be considerably less cumbersome than
14820-524: The team to take their non-linear editor to the NAB Show . After various companies made offers, Keygrip was purchased by Apple as Steve Jobs wanted a product to compete with Adobe Premiere in the desktop video market. At around the same time, Avid—now with Windows versions of its editing software—was considering abandoning the Macintosh platform. Apple released Final Cut Pro in 1999, and despite not being taken seriously at first by professionals, it has evolved into
14950-438: The term: Although film director D. W. Griffith was not part of the montage school, he was one of the early proponents of the power of editing — mastering cross-cutting to show parallel action in different locations, and codifying film grammar in other ways as well. Griffith's work in the teens was highly regarded by Lev Kuleshov and other Soviet filmmakers and greatly influenced their understanding of editing. Kuleshov
15080-400: The uncompressed or losslessly compressed original. Compared to the linear method of tape-to-tape editing, non-linear editing offers the flexibility of film editing, with random access and easy project organization. In non-linear editing, the original source files are not lost or modified during editing. This is one of the biggest advantages of non-linear editing compared to linear editing. With
15210-464: The use of lower-resolution copies of original material provides an opportunity to not just review and edit material remotely but also open up access to far more people to the same content at the same time. In 2004 the first cloud-based video editor , known as Blackbird and based on technology invented by Stephen Streater , was demonstrated at IBC and recognized by the RTS the following year. Since that time
15340-508: The use of non-linear editing systems, the destructive act of cutting of film negatives is eliminated. It can also be viewed as the audio/video equivalent of word processing , which is why it is called desktop video editing in the consumer space. In broadcasting applications, video and audio data are first captured to hard disk-based systems or other digital storage devices. The data are then imported into servers employing any necessary transcoding , digitizing or transfer . Once imported,
15470-465: The video server or other mass storage that stores the video feeds in a given codec, the editing system can use several methods to access the material: The leading professional non-linear editing software for many years has been Avid Media Composer . This software is likely to be present in almost all post-production houses globally, and it is used for feature films, television programs, advertising and corporate editing. In 2011, reports indicated, "Avid
15600-588: The viewer to reach certain conclusions about the action in a film. Montage works because viewers infer meaning based on context. 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. But Eisenstein did not always do his own editing, and some of his most important films were edited by Esfir Tobak. A montage sequence consists of
15730-399: The water tower, the audience believes they went immediately from one to the other. Or that when they climb on the train in one shot and enter the baggage car (a set) in the next, the audience believes they are on the same train. Sometime around 1918, Russian director Lev Kuleshov did an experiment that proves this point. (See Kuleshov Experiment ) He took an old film clip of a headshot of
15860-407: The years, this co-viewing happens less often. Screening dailies give the editor a general idea of the director's intentions. Because it is the first pass, the editor's cut might be longer than the final film. The editor continues to refine the cut while shooting continues, and often the entire editing process goes on for many months and sometimes more than a year, depending on the film. The editor's cut
15990-410: Was among the 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-by-shot) the building (film) is erected. His often-cited Kuleshov Experiment established that montage can lead
16120-487: Was demonstrated in the first all-digital non-linear editing system, the "Harry" effects compositing system manufactured by Quantel in 1985. Although it was more of a video effects system, it had some non-linear editing capabilities. Most importantly, it could record (and apply effects to) 80 seconds (due to hard disk space limitations) of broadcast-quality uncompressed digital video encoded in 8-bit CCIR 601 format on its built-in hard disk array. The term nonlinear editing
16250-439: Was formalized in 1991 with the publication of Michael Rubin's Nonlinear: A Guide to Digital Film and Video Editing —which popularized this terminology over other terminology common at the time, including real-time editing, random-access or RA editing, virtual editing, electronic film editing, and so on. Non-linear editing with computers as it is known today was first introduced by Editing Machines Corp. in 1989 with
16380-430: Was in low-resolution black and white, the 600 was suitable only for offline editing. Non-linear editing systems were built in the 1980s using computers coordinating multiple LaserDiscs or banks of VCRs. One example of these tape and disc-based systems was Lucasfilm's EditDroid , which used several LaserDiscs of the same raw footage to simulate random-access editing. EditDroid was demonstrated at NAB in 1984. EditDroid
16510-416: Was introduced in 1971 by CMX Systems , a joint venture between CBS and Memorex . It recorded and played back black-and-white analog video recorded in " skip-field " mode on modified disk pack drives the size of washing machines that could store a half-hour worth of video & audio for editing. These disk packs were commonly used to store data digitally on mainframe computers of the time. The 600 had
16640-480: Was relatively new. 8K video editing requires advanced hardware and software capable of handling the standard. For imaging software, early works such as HSC Software 's Live Picture brought non-destructive editing to the professional market and current efforts such as GEGL provide an implementation being used in open-source image editing software. An early concern with non-linear editing had been picture and sound quality available to editors. Storage limitations at
16770-643: Was released by TouchVision Systems, Inc. in the mid-1990s and worked with the Action Media II board. These other companies caused tremendous downward market pressure on Avid. Avid was forced to continually offer lower-priced systems to compete with the Media 100 and other systems. Inspired by the success of Media 100, members of the Premiere development team left Adobe to start a project called "Keygrip" for Macromedia. Difficulty raising support and money for development led
16900-468: Was the first system to introduce modern concepts in non-linear editing such as timeline editing and clip bins. The LA-based post house Laser Edit also had an in-house system using recordable random-access LaserDiscs. The most popular non-linear system in the 1980s was Ediflex , which used a bank of U-matic and VHS VCRs for offline editing. Ediflex was introduced in 1983 on the Universal series " Still
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