Editing history and Techniques

Editing history and Techniques 


1930's
there were two machines called the Steenbeck and Moviola, these machines were used to cut up film clips to make them shorter and to fit them together and move them around, if you wanted to move a clip somewhere else you had to do something a long the lines of this.

Television 

November 2nd 1936. 
BBC started to transmit the worlds first public service but just four years later 1940, after it being public it had to be turned off due to world war II, this is because the economy had to supply for the military, this stopped the mass production of Television for five years until 1945.

1948
the first US commercial Broadcast was used on television and the media loved this, it was something that was huge

1950
Everyone could start to watch TV, News broadcasts and Programmes in their home, these shows where recorded live in the studio with lots of cameras, these cameras were hooked up to a switcher, these cameras were hooked up to this switcher, the switcher allowed them to switch between different cameras, different angles. The switcher then sent signals to different affiliates and other parts of the TV network so that they could broadcast it

But the problem with this is that everything has to be done live, so if they messed up that could not be fixed, unless they had a delay between them being live and public broadcast, like a 10 second delay or something like that.

They then turned to something called a kinescope that was focused onto a video monitor then broadcasted, sounds simple but it was far from simple, it had problems such as banding and ghosting, ghosting is when an image is still on the screen when it is indeed not supposed to be there, banding is were lodes of colours in formation contrast in lines on the screen

1951

NBC and CBC had a coast to coast network, they produced a show in New York at  8pm EST and kinescopes in Los Angeles that were 3 hours ahead of them, they would record the signal through the network which they had and they shown that 3 hours later west coast time, this was called 'hot kinescope' its called that because the film did not have a chance to cool down from the development process before it was being sent to be aired.

1954

The TV networks were using so much raw kinescope footage, more than every hollywood company combined, this was because of the demand for TV was getting higher and higher fast. The networks were desperate for a change in cost because it was costing them $4,000 per half hour and in 2013 money that is $33,000 dollars.

Videotape

Magnetic tape had been used for years before hand but it had its fair share of problems like getting video images onto a tape

Back to 1951

Ben Crosby has engineers working for him for his production company, they were first to record images onto a tape, they were the first to prove this was possible, even tho it looked terrible, it was still images on a tape

1956

After five years of hard work and a lot of problems to overcome they finally released the first commercially available video tape, it was a two 2 inch Quadruplex Video tape Recorder, sales were amazing when they showcased it at NAB convention in april of 1956, there was that many sales they had to take orders on napkins. CBS were the first ones to put the recorder to use and they did that on November 30th 1956, with a delay broadcast of "Douglas Edwards and the News"

1957

On january 2nd 1957,  NBC's game show "Truth or Consequences" produced in hollywood was the first ever  Television programme to be broadcasted in all time zones on a pre recorded tape.

1959

The videotape got bigger and was almost accepted everywhere in the TV industry, In summer america information agency did a america national exhibition to show off how far they have came to the russians, this included things such as a fully suited up kitchen and a model TV studio with a ampex video recorder.

July 24th 1959

Vice President Richard Nixon invited Nikita Khrushchev, to visit the display. he joined nixon infront the cameras for a photo opp and the video tape technology, this turned into a political argument in front of the cameras, this was soon to be known as the kitchen debate.

CUTTING TAPE. LITERALLY

Originally, video was edited by visualizing the recorded track with ferrofluid and cutting it with a razor blade or guillotine cutter and splicing with video tape, in a manner similar to film editing. This was an arduous process and avoided where possible. When it was used, the two pieces of tape to be joined were painted with a solution of extremely fine iron filings suspended in carbon tetrachloride (Reference)

and you had to do all of this without even knowing which frame you were on. because it was incapable of holding still frames.

NBC develops a work around using tried and true kinescopes, for work prints not work prints, they would edit the shows using kinescopes film print, it had audio cues which could match to the video tape when they were splicing it

ESG (Offline Editing)

editing with a lower quality version and then essembeling the original with that edit, this technique was used in Rowan and Martins LAUGH IN in 1968, it required 350 to 440 tape splices and overall over 60 hours of physical splicing just to finish one episode, this ended up being the only program to use this technique extensively.

Linear Editing

if you had two video decks you could transfer them one to the other and build up a show with lots of different cuts, before it became popular, it needed something to help it a long

1963

Ampex released the editec, an all electronic video-tape  recorder that had a micro processor that could control in and out points marked by audible tones, by this time helical scan VTR's were coming more popular, they wrapped a tape around a spinning read head so you can fit more bandwidth which allowed you to pause on frames, made editing a lot easier.

1967

SMPTE Timecode

SMPTE Timecode developed by EECO and developed by society of motion pictures TV engineers, this gave each frame an address, what time it was on, minutes, seconds and which frame it was, this made it even easier, if you wanted to edit creatively you would have to go back to film, this was because of EDL (editing decision lists) that marked in and outs to be used, if you changed the beginning then you would have to change the rest of it.

Non Linear Editing

More of a natural way of editing, you can move clips around, be more creative. For this you required a computer power and Fast Data Storage

1771

the first NLE was the CMX 600, which recorded half resolution black and white video files onto washing machine sized disk packs, the whole thing cost just a bit over $250,000 each, only six were ever produced

1984

The Editdroid, made by george lucas spinoff company, droidworks, which pulled footage off laser disks, which did not work that well at all, the company shut down in 1987

1988

EMC released the first offline non linear editor, with the data stored on optical disks

1989

the avid/1, an macintosh non linear editing which then became the most used to edit in Hollywood for editing, but storage was still an issue, they could only editing short music videos and commercials

1993

engineers added more storage to an avid system and dayviewing a 7 terabyte system (7,000 Gigabytes) capable of adding a feature length film, these were being edited offline, the reverse of NBC'S EGS method they used low quality digital files to create a work cut and used a time code from that work cut to create an EDL which was given to the film lab to assemble the original film prints

The first studio filmed cut which was filmed in avid was "lost in yonkers" in 1993,

1997

Editor,  Walter Murch received an oscar for best editing in the film the "the english patient"

unfortunately I can not write more about the history starting from where it was and where it is now because of time, I will talk about the machines they used and so on and also this.

• The purposes of editing: how we create pace and engage the viewer through editing
• The conventions of editing: continuity, jump cuts, the 180 degree rule, dissolves (uses of), shot-reverse-shot, cutting to a sound-track

when you cut something, how you make it edit it and so on has to match the story the majority of the time, what is going on, for example if there is a horror scene, someone is behind a door waiting for someone you might keep a still shot of that person waiting for the person to come up, you would not make lots of cuts, different camera angles every 3 seconds or so. this is to build the tension of what is going on in the scene, it is was attracts people to carry on watching, this is why the style of the editing is essential that you get it on point.

and for the pace you also have to have that on point with the storyline, make sure everyone knows what is going on, you can do this by the kind of shots you use, let people know what is going on,kind of guide them through the film or use hints, so they get the guide of what is going on in the movie.

as you can see in this scene from the hobbit, it has great pace, it keeps you up to date with whats going on, they show them in the barrels and them legolas fighting, they go scene to scene them in the barrels to legolas fighting, keeping you up to date, 

The 180 degree rule.

this rule is crucial, as you can see in this image it looks like they are sitting side by side from each other, which they are, but if you use but the camera on the other side of one of them, so each shot is on a different side, one of the right and one on the left, it would not look as right, like they are talking  with each other, this is called the 180 degree rule, its when you dont go the full 360 degrees with the camera, you keep the camera on one side and dont put it on the other side, it makes things look better, like they are actually interacting, this is not just used for simple interaction shots like this.

you can use it for things like this, he is getting a gun aimed aimed at him, look at their eyes, its gives the effect that they are making eye contact with each other, if you put the camera on the other side you would still get this effect but it would be a lot less effective, this is why its crucial to remember things such as this when you are angling your shots.

Dissolves

dissolves are sometimes what you use to lead one scene into another scene they are many other ways you can lead a shot into another but I will be talking about this one, in the first part you can see where it dissolves into the next scene, it does this because of the pace of the scene going on so it just leads you into the next one slowly, so editing, pace and dissolving all come together pretty much, in this video it also shows other things such as other kind of ways you can change scene to scene, you can just skip straight to it, but for this kind of thing it mostly works with a scene that is kind of fast paced, because if you get a random dissolve in a fast paced scene, it can ruin it, it just goes from fast to slow and it does not work in most cases.

Reverse Shot.

reverse shots are when you imply the 180 degree rule to a conversation or some kind of confrontation, like in this scene, you can see when the camera is over the shoulder of the person who is getting spoken to and the camera is aimed at the person who is talking, this is to show who is talking and who they are talking to, because the camera is over the shoulder of the person who is getting talked to, this is used a lot in movies, because not everyone knows a lot about film shots, they just wanna watch the film, so it indicates and hints them through who is talking and so on so they know and it also works well in movies.
                                                                                                               
                                                                                           Cutting to the soundtrack

It is important that you cut to the soundtrack, the music, for example in this trailer for the movie TAKEN 3  it has a lot of scenes which cut to the soundtrack, for example from the first minute in to 30 seconds later, you can see the cutting that is rather slow that matches the soundtrack and then it speeds up because he is fighting, this is also gotta do with pace. Lets say you have a fighting scene and you put a very slow paced song over it, it simply will not give out the right effect you want your audience to have and it simply will not work, this is why cutting to the soundtrack when you make a movie or anything such as this you need to cut to the soundtrack, if you have one, otherwise it just will not work most of the time