The Development of Editing
Over the years filming and editing has evolved as technology has advanced, I will be going through the history of cinema. Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer, important for his pioneering in his work in photographic studies of motion and motion-picture projection.He immigrated to the united states as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite valley, California, made him world famous. He is famous for his work in animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
Persistence of vision is the theory that your eyes keeps the image your eye has captured for half a second, this means that everything we see is a suitable blend of everything we see now and everything we see fractions of a second ago, this can explain the blurry vision people see when something is moving fast.
Example of persistence of vision.
A Zoetrope is an example of persistence of vision, this is because it is a series of images in a circle, inside a cardboard circle with slots cut into it, the idea is that you look through the slits and spin the circle, because of the speed in which you see the pictures spin around, it appears as if the image is movie, this could be because of persistence of vision.
Here is an example.
It is important to understand frames and frame rates, because we still use this in production and post-production.
The first film cameras used a roll of film that was mechanically moved past a shutter and lens system, this was invented in France by the Lumiere Brother and in America by Thomas Edison at around the same point in history.
The first films were created with these cameras, but were not edited as they usually consisted of one shot from a single point of veiw.
The concept of using a variety of shot choices, using multiple points of view, and the story following action did come around until editing in camera was invented.
Editing in camera is when you film it shot by shot in order of how you want it to be presented, you also had to cut exactly where you wanted it to end and start when you wanted it to begin. Editing in camera still exists however, for example at the straight 8 film festival a competition where filmakers make an edited in camera movie on a single 8mm film cartridge.
An early historical example of editing in camera is the 1902 film History of an American Firefighter.
Editing
As you can see, editing in camera was never going to be very good, it was too difficult to line up a shot and prepare it to start and finish exactly when you wanted it to every time, so early film makers were crying out for a way to trim shots, and to alter the order of shorter section of film, called clips.
In the early days of movie production trimming clips was done with a simple pair of scissors and a magnifying glass, as this was the first way developed to actually edit a film.
The first mechanical editing decks, used to cut up and reassemble movies were invented by Iwan Serrurier in 1924. He founded the Moviola company.
These machines revolutionised editing and allowed more sophisticated cutting techniques to be developed.
The technique of cutting film and resembling the pieces, wether done by hand or machine is known as "linear editing". It is called linear editing simple because you are assembling the clips one after the other. The process is purely mechanical.
From 1920 until the end of the second world war, film editing was done almost exclusively on Moviola decks. Then in 1945 the German company Steenbeck introduced their machine. Steensbecks rapidly became the industry standard.
This process of cutting film still goes on today and Steenbeck still produce and sell editing decks, here is a video of one being used.
Invention of Video Editing
The idea of recording something other than film was invented in 1951 by the Ampex research team, this was video tape, the first video editing machines came into existance a few years later in 1956.
The first broadcast quality video recorder was the Ampex VR-1000, The VR-1000 recorded a black and white picture with a mono audio channel on a 2"
wide video tape. The tape ran at a familiar and economical 15-inches per second.
The picture was recorded across the tape from top to bottom using four heads on
a rotating drum (Quadruplex recording). This arrangement gives an effective
video recording speed of approximately 1560 inches per second.
Because it was so good it needed to lend itself to editing, and it did, it was spliced the same way audio tape was, it needed more care since you were splicing video and audio, so for it to run smoothly on air, the splice needed to be made on an exact spot on the tape.
To make the technically "perfect" splice, you first "developed" the tape. This
was done so that, with the aid of a microscope, you could see where to make the
cut. The "developer" is a solution containing fine metal particles that are
attracted by the magnetized areas of the video tape. You then used the
guillotine knife to cut the tape. Finally the splice was completed by using 3M
video splicing tape to join the two ends.
(To read up more, please visit: http://vtoldboys.com/editingmuseum/index)
The original editing systems were also linear editing systems, however instead of physically cutting the video tape, the data was compie from one tape to another, via control deck which would control the in and out points of the clip you wanted to copie across.
At this point both the image quality and editing techniques were very primative. They were used primarily for TV usage, the picture quality and audio were not suitable for cinema use.
The first feature film shot on video was Julie and Julia 1987. The first comercial movie shot in HD was 2004 Once Upon a Time in Mexico. (Which is a great movie by the way)
Non-linear Editing Systems (NLE)
The first attempts to create non-linear editing systems were in the 1970's but no one was able to bring commercial system to the market. Lucasfilm started developing the system in the 1980's with their EditDroid which was a system based on laser disc technology. This however, never turned into a commercial system.
The first commercially sucssesful proffesional NLE systems were created in 1989, when AVID launched the Avid 1 Media Composer editing system. The Avid editing system was a hardware plus softwear based on Apple Computer technology.
This was the first computer based system that turned taped data into files. Files that could then be moved about on a timeline. One of the major developments which allowed this to happen was the creation of the digital video cameras. The first professional camera, the Sony D1 coming onto the market in 1986.
What allowed this change from linear to non-linear was the video or film could be transformed into digital information and that information could then be altered without destroying the original file. This is known as Non destructive editing.
Oncethe images were digital, it became possible to alter and manipulate that data in ways that were imposible using linear editing systems.
Story-Telling
No matter what genre you were creating, be it drama, documentary or etc, the purpose of editing is the same, effective story telling.
We do this by controling the audiences POV (point of view), the shots we decide to produce in our shoot, these shots are exactly what we need to tell our story in the edit.
Genre is defined by the content or style of the film, for example, a comedy is a film created with the intention of being funny, comedies can be about anything, but are defined by their good vibe, and feel good attitude, inteded to make the audience laugh, an example of a comedy would be Who Framed Rodger Rabbit.
Another Genre would be Horror, horror films are created with the intent to scare the audience, and usually have a paranormal setting, an example of a horror film would be IT.
Another film genre would be Romance, a romance film is created to tell a romantic story, always involving love, an example of a Romance film is Casablanca.
Pace and Rythm, this is used to create tention in a scene, the more cuts per minute, the faster the pace, for example, an action scene in an action movie may use lots of quick cuts to create some fast paced action, here is an example of that.
On the other side of the coin, a slow scene, such as in a Romance film, can be made with few cuts, to create a air of close intimacy (Though this is also helped by the camera work and etc).
Combining shots into sequences to engage the viewer is an important part of film making, it's were each shot goes on to tell the story and raises questions for the audience and then answering them.
An example of this is the shower scene from psycho when the woman is getting into the shower and you see the figure sneaking up behind her, then revealing the killer and showing that he had nothing but intention to murder her.
Conventions and Techniques
Shot-Reverse-Shot is a Technique used during dialog sequences, between characters talking, it is were the camera keep switching back and forth between these two characters, but never crossing the invisible 180 degree line, this is to avoid confusion so that the characters do not switch sides on the screen.
A good example of this is the video above from Casablanca, when the two characters are talking.
Montage, these are used to speed up the telling of a story, usually to show the passage of time as a character expands and grows, a famous example of this is the bit in Rocky, were he is training but another example can be found in Karate Kid, as he trains.
