The Development of Editing Technology
The earliest films on the 1900s were all done through camera with little to no editing involved, therefore the entire film would just be one reel and seen start to finish. James Williamson's 1900 film Attack on a China Mission' was one of the first films to involve cutting between shots. The film is 2 minutes in length and consists of only 2 shots.'The Great Train Robbery' is a 1903 Western Film directed by Edwin S. Porter, and it is considered as a milestone in film-making. This is because the film used a variety of innovative editing techniques, such as: cross-cutting, double exposure composite editing, camera movements, and on location shooting. This film had a running time of 12 minutes, and included a total of 20 different shots and 10 different indoor and outdoor locations. Porter was a pioneer of the 'cross-cutting' editing method, which is used to show two simultaneous events occurring at different places.
The first piece of editing hardware appeared in 1924 was the Moviola - a device that allows an editor to view the film while editing it. This allowed editors to cut strips of footage and attach them together in order to create cuts within the film. However, the moviola's functions were limited and the operation of the device was slow. Further developments in editing technology saw that flatbed editors were invented in the 1930s. Though flatbeds became the more popular option for film editing during the 1970s due to their simplicity and clearer images over the moviola. Flatbed editors consisted of two separate motorized disks, one for picture and the other for sound, the plates move simultaneously and as picture is projected onto a screen a magnetic playback head reads the audio tracks. The two most common brands of the flatbed editor were Steenbeck and KEM (Keller-Electro-Mechanik).
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| Moviola |
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| Flatbed Editor |
This method of editing is called Linear editing, the process of selecting, modifying, and arranging images and sound in a predetermined sequence. The simple hardware such as the moviola means that this method of editing is inexpensive and quicker for smaller editing jobs. However, in 1971 the first non-linear editor was introduced. The CMX-600 was a digital console consisting of two monitors. The right monitor played the preview video, and was used by the editor to make cuts and edits; the monitor on the left was used to display the edited video. It wasn't until 1991 that the term 'non-linear editing' became officially formalized, when companies such as 'Avid' publicly introduced their device: the Avid 1. At this point digital products began to replace the classic editing tools such as the moviola. This form of editing was largely computerized and operated in a way the the original content isn't modified during the editing, therefore editors didn't have to start over if a mistake was made. This was a huge development it allowed editors to access any frame in a digital video clip and 'cut-and-paste' that clip to a different part of the sequence.
Non-linear editing is a form of offline editing, where raw footage is copied and edited without affecting the original tape, and the offline approach has been in film editing since the start. Offline editing is essentially the whole editing process, where editors cut and piece clips together in order to tell a story. However, online editing is a process that is performed in the final stages of the production, and is the fine-tuning of the project. This focuses on aspects such as the quality of the picture, colour correction, visual effects, and other fine details of the project. The online editor will also ensure that the production is broadcast safe by ensuring certain aspect ratios and video levels.
Nowadays, film editing is carried out on modern editing software. Platforms such as Final cut and premiere pro allow editors to transfer video onto a hard drive, where it can be edited and converted in order to be output to a variety of formats. Premiere pro was one of the first computer based non-linear editing systems, with its first release in 1991. These platforms are the go-to for editing in modern times, as they provide editors with high resolution editing and the ability to access different formats.
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