Development of Film Editing Technology
The technology we use for editing film has progressed greatly from the early days of cinema. Today we use non-linear digital editing soft wear such as Premier Pro and Final Cut editing with high quality digital recordings a long way from where the story of editing began.
Cutting
The original editors back in the early years of film learned most of the editing techniques used today through accident and through experimentation. Originally you had no hardware to help you with editing apart from light that you could shine through your film and a scalpel or scissors to actually cut the film. To get increase accuracy or the chance of it lenses could be used like microscopes and magnifying glasses to look closer at the space between frames. The only hardware was physical tools and adhesive this was tricky and film was often laboured over or damaged this way. Film splicing became easier as time went on as some of these inventions helped alignment and attachment.
Moviola
The Moviola was the first widely successful editing technology created by Iwan Serrurier in 1924and allowed for better viewing and editing. It was an upright vertical editor that had magnification and precision when it came to cutting film. Its key features that made it very popular until the 1970s and the dawn of flatbed editing suits was its accuracy and portability. It had a far reaching influence being snapped up by major Hollywood film companies in the 1930s and used throughout the 2nd world war.
Flatbed Edit Suits
In the 1970s a flatbed editing system was developed by companies like Steenbeck since the 1930s was released and started to replace the old Moviola machine. Using wheels and magnetic tape the flatbed editor worked more like a work table being able to edit film and audio easily by locking tracks an finding frames through a stamped number system. This system became popular and more prominent in studios due to its accessibility but was not portable.
Linear and Non-Linear editing
There were two main ways to edit film which were linear and non-linear. As the names suggest linear was the method of editing from one roll of film onto another having the edited roll copied in its order to the second through flatbeds or kinescopes one after another. This way of editing although common for a time had the draw back of being hard to arrange even after the introduction of the equipment in 1963 Ampex Editec and the 1967 system of SMPTE which assigned each frame a number in terms of hours minutes seconds and frames eg. 01 12 34 16. Non linear is associated today with modern digital editing but is closely related to the original cutting of film. Non-linear editing is to cut and move pieces of the footage without damaging the rest of the sequence slicing where you see fit and manoeuvring the film to its desired space without strict timing codes to work. CMX 600 in 1971 was the first machine to use non-linear editing and had the bonuses that came with it of no degradation as there would be no copying transference as there is in linear editing. Becoming easier to learn and use Non-linear is now the way digital stations let you interact with your footage.
Online and Offline Editing
Offline editing is when you are editing with a copy of your footage but at a lower quality so you can be bolder with your cuts and shift until you have made your editing decisions which will then be applied to your high quality original footage. Early machines that could do this were talking a step toward the digital and the lower quality scans would not only be for ease and comfort in not damaging the original but because of the limits in computing technology at the time.
Online editing came into play after the mid to late 1990s where computing power was strong enough to handle high quality compressed formats of footage where by a high quality version would be digital and could be edited on. From the early 2000s it became possible and more common place to record and edit the entire film project digitally without the use of film what so ever.
The Digital Era
From the late 1980s systems like that of the AVID started to inhabit the digital space. The AVID was an editing system that was created for the Apple 2 computer and quickly shook up the editing world the problem was the system was expensive. There technology was soon repeated and further by competitors during the 90s running the prices lower and lower as the quality got higher. Digital workstations such as Final Cut and Premier Pro were in there infancy utilising such progress such as Inter-compression grouping digital signals and compressing them to save memory space allowed for wholly digital editing creations
Modern Editing Platforms
Editing now is so intertwined with the limits of computing that with every new discovery comes soon after the furthering in quality digital workstations can produce. Today many professionals use tools such as Final Cut and Premier pro to create films at quality of 4k resolution. With the advancement of digital editing technology the accesabillity too has increase with free basic software found through download to low end software used every day with the likes of movie maker. The future of digital editing looks bright now as the digital can fool our minds past the reality and on towards hyper reality.
