4

The Instruments

► Linear and Nonlinear Editing Systems

The digital revolution has triumphed. It has succeeded in supplanting the old order. An unimpeded rush of breakthroughs in processing speed, computer memory, and software development has altered the world of filmmaking. Devices such as hex core processors, ATX motherboards, RAM chips, and graphics cards have infiltrated the nomenclature of today’s filmmaker.

Just as the history of medicine is reflected in the development of technology, so too motion picture editing has advanced from simple physical devices to a complex virtual technology.

In Praise of the Physical Body

Film, that celluloid strip of images with perforations punched along its edges, had postponed its final bow for longer than predicted. Something about its clarity, richness, and depth kept it in the limelight or, rather, the Xenon light of the theater projector. Despite its expense and veteran status, film still finds favor among higher-budget productions, such as those produced by the studios and directed by major directors. Today it also has the advantage of serving as an archival medium.

Part of film’s attraction derives from its makeup. The fact that it is a physical medium made of light-sensitive silver salts suspended in gelatin layers contributes to its vast color range and depth. As the exposed film stock bathes in the chemical solutions that will reveal the latent image, it acquires microscopic plateaus and valleys. The images etch the surface in relief that, when projected, transfer to the motion picture screen. The people and settings appear to come alive. Even more than the artificial design of 3D projection, all motion picture film displays actual depth. Film has depth where video, including high-definition video, is shallow. For many years this point, both practical and metaphoric, was not lost on filmmakers as video comprised the world of network television, a medium that with a few brilliant exceptions existed basically to sell soap, beer, and cigarettes. But TV has become bolder, smarter, and, in some cases, less commercialized. And the paltry scanned image that made us voyeurs peering through the narrow Venetian blinds of 525 interlaced lines advanced to high-definition’s 1080 lines of progressive images and has now entered the ultra high-definition realm of 4K, 6K, 8K, and beyond.

Figure 4.1 The interlaced video frame, as used in standard- and high-definition formats

As the human world continues its departure from the physical, editing joins in the march. Veteran editors speak of the attractive feel, look, and even the smell of 35 mm celluloid film. The magic of its image, liberated through photochemical baths, entrances their imagination. Some miss the connectedness that comes with physically touching the material, feeling the weight and texture of a film roll, coordinating its movement through the editing machine, severing it, and reconnecting it on the splicing block. Others declare good riddance to the unwieldiness of it all. Historically, this is not a new occurrence. The movement away from the physical began at the dawn of civilization when hunter/gatherers, finding it more efficient to plant seeds than to forage for food, settled down on their land, built farming communities, and made way for priests and artists to hold up a mirror to their lives. From that moment on through to the Industrial Revolution and into the Information Age, humanity has shed more and more of its physical requirements. Yet ironically, we remain highly physical beings, and those who negate this part of themselves often suffer for it.

Even if an editor will never work with celluloid, it helps to have some familiarity with the medium, if only to understand from where the current paradigm derived. To hold up a piece of film to the light is to understand what a frame really looks like. Understanding a frame helps the editor to envision the length of a beat (about eight frames) or to conceive of a second of screen time (a foot and a half). Physically making a splice on a metal splicing block reinforces the consequences of each decision. But most of all, physically handling the film brings the person into a relationship with the medium in which he or she works, and that is indescribable. It is a relationship that resides in the realm of the senses and not the intellect.

We have moved from the skills of physically manipulating materials to the mental manipulation of commands. Is this inhuman? Hardly. If humanity is the sole purveyor of technology among the animal kingdom and all new technology will ultimately be used—from the printing press to the atom bomb—it is best not to become too attached to any particular instrument or machine. Even Avid Media Composer and Premiere Pro will eventually be supplanted by another storytelling instrument better suited to its time.

► An Editor’s Tools

As an art form heavily reliant on technology, editing has experienced several epochs in the advancement of its tools. While benefiting from the greater ease and options brought on by innovation, editors must always remember that the real work derives from within.

Medieval Medicine: The Moviola

The scissors, magnifying glass, and banana oil film cement with its ubiquitous aroma that entranced the senses of filmmakers from the earliest eras gave way to a wider array of instruments, including splicing blocks, trim tabs, grease pencils, and the world’s first editing machine. Its inventor, a Dutch-born electrical engineer Iwan Serrurier, dubbed his home movie player the Moviola (Figure 4.2), a takeoff on the home music player of the time, the Victrola. It used sewing machine–type motors, belts, and pedals. One pedal supplied variable speed, while the other, operating a more powerful motor, controlled the constant speed motor. A Geneva drive, an element that was first used by Swiss watchmakers, converted the motor’s continuous rotating motion into intermittent motion by use of a gear shaped like a Maltese Cross. Intermittent motion combined with persistence of vision created motion pictures.

It wasn’t until an editor at Douglas Fairbanks Studios realized that the machine could be used for viewing dailies that the Moviola gained prominence in the motion picture industry. From then on it became the standard equipment in editing rooms for over 60 years. In a sense, it was the first nonlinear, random access system, since the takes could be broken down into individual rolls and lined up in any order. Since the picture and soundtrack were wound together on each roll and secured with a labeled trim tab, the editor could grab any take she wished to view, run it through the Moviola, mark it, cut it, and go on to the next. A spindle on the machine’s side allowed for quick rewinding of the filmstrips into a roll. For a striking and humorous image of an editor cutting on a Moviola, see the Coen brothers film Hail Caesar! (2016; Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.2 The original Moviola

Photo by Jim Turner of Moviola

Figure 4.3 The editor C. C. Calhoun (Frances McDormand) in Hail Caesar! (2016) wrestles with the Moviola

Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures

With its sewing machine–like parts and mechanical chatter, the Moviola incorporated the accouterments of the seamstress’s profession. Some early editors even spoke of the 3-foot length of film, often determined to be the correct length for an establishing shot, as a schneid. This term, originally shortened from Schneider, a Yiddish and German word for tailor—literally a “cutter”—represented a length of fabric stretching from the tip of the master’s nose to the end of his outstretched arm. This reinforced the physical stitching together aspect of the editor’s art.

Because of its simple design, the Moviola could usually be repaired by any editor or his assistant. If the screen went dead, it usually meant that a bulb had blown out. If the film didn’t advance, a belt may have broken and could easily be refitted. If the sound stopped working, a fuse in the amplifier could be replaced. This reinforced a connection between the machine’s operator and the machine. Today, according to author and lecturer Pete Markiewicz, in a talk at the Art Institute, most young people “use technology constantly, but have little idea how it works.” Even fewer could take a computer apart and put it back together. Markiewicz likens this naïve trust in technology to “earlier generations who welcomed processed food and food additives” but had no idea how these commodities were produced. In terms of computers, the basic concept of binary codes evolving to machine language evolving to higher-level languages as they relate to electronic switches that were originally vacuum tubes but now reside within extremely dense microprocessors is not hard to grasp, but many prefer to accept some sort of arcane magic operating at the most basic levels of computer design.

European Renaissance: The Flatbed

After decades of the Moviola’s rein, a new kind of machine appeared on the Hollywood scene in the 1970s. These were flatbed editing machines, designed in Europe and used as far back as the 1930s. The two main flatbed manufacturers were Steenbeck, which garnered most of its attention from East Coast editors, and KEM (Keller-Elektronik-Mechanik; Figure 4.4), which came to dominate West Coast editing rooms. Both were manufactured in Germany. Moviola produced its own version of a flatbed that became popular with editors who worked with 16 mm film.

Figure 4.4 The KEM flatbed editing machine

Reproduced by permission of Joel Marshall, Atomic Film Company

Employing sets of sprocketed rollers and rotating platters to transport the film through picture and sound heads, the flatbed machine allowed for easy screening of full rolls of film—up to 2000 feet in length—on large monitors. Unlike the Moviola that used the Geneva movement to supply the intermittent motion, the flatbeds used a rotating prism. Consequently the image, though larger, was not as sharp as the Moviola’s. In order to engage and disengage the multiple film plates, as well as to determine the direction of spin, the flatbed required more buttons than the Moviola. Its three main buttons, the forerunners of the J-K-L computer keys, operated forward, stop, and rewind.

The most popular flatbed, the KEM Universal, used eight plates to hold picture and sound film, and supported interchangeable picture and sound modules. In this way multiple tracks or multiple camera angles could be evaluated simultaneously. Dailies, as well as the cut workprint and worktrack, were assembled onto 1000-foot KEM rolls, one for picture and one for sound. These were labeled using black and red ink, respectively. A 35 mm workprint had to last the editor for the duration of the process. Consequently, it was essential to treat it with care, guard it against too many nicks and scratches, and avoid cinching it, which would scatter microscopic nicks throughout the roll. The KEM’s larger screens and improved audio system allowed for presentation of the cut workprint to larger groups. The flatbed’s multiple camera and multiple soundtrack features were the precursor to the vast array of tracks that electronic nonlinear systems now offer.

After the 1970s it was not uncommon to see both the KEMs and Moviolas coexisting in the same editing room. Editors accustomed to the speed of selection through random access of Moviola rolls preferred to produce their first cut on the more archaic machine and then finesse it on the KEM. Even though a Moviola equipped with special arms could run 1000-foot reels of film, the KEM made recutting simpler because of the fast rewind speeds, the less cumbersome loading, and the large viewing screens.

The Modern Revolution: Nonlinear

After decades of dependable use, the Moviola and KEM saw themselves unseated by the rise of the electronic revolution. As computers became more accessible and memory storage larger, software developers conjured up the idea of editing movies in a virtual environment. Video editing by use of timecoded playback and recording on videotape had been around for a long time, so the concept of capturing the images and storing them as digital media and then editing them in a virtual format was truly novel. Early systems such as Montage, a system preferred by Francis Ford Coppola, Editflex, and CMX were popular but still fairly cumbersome to use. They lacked the user-friendly graphical interface that would appear in later years. Editflex and CMX, for instance, used banks of laserdiscs to store media and required the editor to type in the beginning and ending timecode as well as a duration for each and every cut. In modern systems the click of a virtual button automatically generates a timecode that corresponds with the beginning and end frames of the selected clip.

Nonlinear editing or NLE systems—those allowing random access to dailies as well as the ability to insert a shot at any place in the sequence without having to rebuild the sequence from that point onward—were initially offline systems. This allowed for speed of assembly at lower resolution. The lower cost of these systems, compared to the high cost of online editing, also meant that editors could expend more time in developing the cut. After a final cut was achieved, it was reassembled at full resolution on an online system using an EDL or edit decision list. In the case of film, the editing machine stored the film’s keycodes. Like video timecode, the film keycode designated every film frame, allowing a negative cut list to be generated as a guide for the negative cutter who would conform the original negative based on the editor’s final cut.

With the potential to capture high-definition video at full resolution or to reassemble a downconverted, lower resolution cut in full resolution on the same system, the distinction between offline and online editing is disappearing.

Early Electronic Systems

In some early systems the computer linked to videotape players while other systems linked to information on large laserdiscs. George Lucas’s system, the EditDroid, was another system to use laserdiscs. While still requiring that the dailies be burned to two redundant laserdiscs, EditDroid offered a graphical interface with a timeline and Source and Record monitors, much like current nonlinear editing systems. Although it received fairly limited use, it was the true pioneer of the timeline-based systems in use today. One of EditDroid’s disadvantages resided in its use of laserdiscs that had to be burned professionally, usually at a remote laboratory.

Avid’s solution of allowing the editor to digitize media onto hard drives in the computer was a big breakthrough and led ultimately to its predominance in the field (Figure 4.5). Because of the cost and bulkiness of early media storage, the maximum drive size was nine gigabytes, costing roughly $1000 per gigabyte, an astonishing figure by today’s standards. Because of the low processing speeds coupled with minimal memory, analog dailies were digitized at low resolution. In this regard, the image was far inferior to the picture viewed on a Moviola or KEM. But the increased speed of editing as well as the capability to render effects, such as titles, fades, and matte keys, that previously were sent out to the film lab made the new systems desirable.

Figure 4.5 The Avid Media Composer

Photo courtesy of Christy’s Editorial

With advances in technology, NLE systems moved from digitizing standard definition analog video to capturing high-definition digital video.

Some editors, unable to make the transition from physical to virtual, left the profession, in spite of the fact that the Motion Picture Editor’s Guild made a point of educating their members about the new NLE systems. Yet editors accustomed to film editing discovered something else. They discovered that the time they used to spend mulling over a cut, those valuable moments that occurred while the film was rewinding on the KEM or while an assistant was hunting down a clip to extend a trim, had disappeared. They missed the chance discoveries made while the cut sequence or dailies rewound on the flatbed. The arrival of NLE systems allowed the editor to scroll quickly through masses of film and edited footage by dragging the playhead through the scroll bar. This greatly accelerated the decision-making process without the accompanying time allowance to consider each cut. Avid, and systems like it, bring instant gratification, speed, and the opportunity to make multiple versions.

Just as the Moviola had lingered well after the introduction of the KEM or Steenbeck to editing rooms, the KEM and Steenbeck remained for years after the introduction of the Avid, allowing assistants matchback of the editor’s virtual cut to the actual 35 mm workprint for projection in test screenings.

The Mouse That Roared

Apple, the company that originally supported Avid technology, eventually got the idea to produce its own editing system. With similar functions as the Avid, Apple’s system was software-based, meaning it could run on various Apple products. And it was far less costly than the Avid, where a full system could cost as much as a Ferrari, including decks and monitors. For under $1000 an aspiring editor could cut his movie on Final Cut Pro 7. It was an extraordinary move and influenced a new generation of editors, some of whom, to this day, refuse to transition to another system. In an effort to regain its once overwhelming market share, Avid launched its own competitively priced system, the Avid Express, a simplified version of its studio models. Today, Avid offers its Media Composer, an excellent and sophisticated software that has lived in professional editing rooms for decades, at a low price.

With the rise of nonlinear, digital editing, Latin terms supplanted the more basic film terms of picture and sound. These were video and audio, respectively. What was once a workprint became a sequence, and the soundtrack became the audio track.

► The Edit

During the majority of filmmaking’s history, a cut consisted of a few simple steps. After marking the selected piece of film with a grease pencil, the head of the shot was placed on a splicer and severed from the rest of the body. Then the feet were cut off, and the resultant clip was joined to a series of other clips, assembled into a parade of images, the workprint, which eventually comprised the entire two-hour motion picture. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the guillotine splicer sparked allusions to the French Revolution and its liberty, equality, and fraternity. Today the digital revolution has spawned a variety of choices when making the same simple move. Depending on which system the editor is working on, he or she has various options for affecting the cut.

All this is a far cry from the simple act of cutting the head and tail off of a spool of film and pasting the selected clip beside another. Ultimately, a cut is just a cut. You mark an in point and an out point, and somehow—even after much acrobatics—add it to the sequence of other cuts in the timeline or on a filmstrip.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that it is the editor and not the equipment that makes the cut. Until recently all thermometers were glass probes with a bulb of mercury on one end. As the mercury rose through the thermometer’s graduated shaft, it indicated the temperature. Today most thermometers contain heat-sensitive circuitry and digital readouts. They have little resemblance to the original instrument. But both ultimately do the same thing: They reveal a patient’s temperature. Editing, despite the vast assortment of new possibilities, ultimately remains about one thing: the juxtaposition of images based on the footage provided. This is known as the cut. All editing machines, no matter how simple or sophisticated, perform this essential function. In that regard it does not matter if the device is an ancient pair of scissors, a simple computer program like iMovie, or the most sophisticated and advanced Avid Media Composer system.

The Frame Matters

The first 35 mm movies used the entire film frame, which appeared nearly square. This was later adapted to TV, which fit inside a box with a 4:3 aspect ratio to accommodate the limited transmission scan lines. After decades, the square TV image evolved to the fiercely debated 16 × 9 aspect ratio of the new high-definition format. This closely mimics the theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Unlike the theatrical 1.85 format, however, television’s 16 × 9 format encodes an anamorphic image into the digital signal. This must be unsqueezed during playback.

For the film doctor, the fact that only part of the frame area is used introduced valuable opportunities. In order to produce a 1.85:1 ratio image from a square film frame, it is necessary to matte the top and bottom of the image. Because of this, the director of photography (DP) will compose according to the etched frame lines in the camera’s viewfinder. But the additional north and south information remains preserved on the film negative. In some cases a shot could be saved by repositioning the frame lines by a field or two in order to remove a boom or to include information that was cut off, as in Figures 4.7 through 4.9.

Today, ultra high-definition video allows the editor even greater latitude in terms of image manipulation within the frame. The high-resolution, unmatted image can be expanded and repositioned as necessary to remove unwelcome objects in the frame or, more significantly, re-compose the image to emphasize particular information.

Anamorphic

Anamorphic describes the widescreen process that involves squeezing the image through the taking lens of the camera, then unsqueezing it at the projection stage (Figure 4.6). This allows a greater amount of information to be optically compressed into the film frame and then displayed across a wider screen area. The process was originally developed in France by Dr. Henri Chrétien, and then purchased and renamed CinemaScope by 20th Century Fox. Following its introduction, many other widescreen processes appeared, including Technirama, Vistascope, Superscope, VistaVision (where the film moved through the camera sideways, much like the larger format film system that came afterwards, IMAX), and Techniscope (using half-sized frames that were stretched into full frames in the lab). Today, electronic technology allows for the digital squeezing and unsqueezing of the image, as well.

Figure 4.6 The anamorphic process

Note: The upper part of the illustration shows the image as the camera’s viewfinder sees it. The middle portion displays the squeezed image as it resides on 35 mm film. The bottom portion reveals how the subject will look on a theater’s screen. Notice how the initial wide, rectangular image has been squeezed by the camera’s taking lens into a square film frame and then expanded back to a widescreen image.

Figure 4.7 What the camera’s viewfinder shows

Figure 4.8 What the film or video captures

Figure 4.9 What the editor sees

Note: The Avid’s left Source monitor shows the original footage while the right Record monitor exhibits the image as modified by the editor, as it appears in the final cut with some of the ground removed.

Figure 4.10 What the audience views

One-Stop Shopping

Postproduction procedures that used to be the purview of labs and DPs more and more fall under the control of the editor. Though aspects such as color timing (also known as color grading or color correction) still find their final outcome in labs or post houses, soon everything may be accomplished in the editing suite.

Doctor’s Note

Nearly 100 years ago, in the films of Mary Pickford, color was used long before Technicolor would introduce its full-color three-strip imbibition process. Scenes were run through a chemical tint bath and colored in terms of emotional or environmental tone. Moonlit scenes were tinted blue, scenes of pain or anger were tinted red, and so on. For an excellent example, see the restored version of the 1919 film Daddy Long Legs (Figure 4.11), with a wonderful and lively score by Maria Newman. The film tells the story of a feisty orphan, Judediah Booth, who eventually finds an education outside the orphanage through a mysterious benefactor, Daddy Long Legs. She becomes a published author, rises in society, and eventually discovers the identity of her benefactor, who, it turns out, is also the man she’s fallen in love with. In a particularly disturbing scene where Judediah is punished for getting drunk on a found jug of whiskey, her finger is held to the hot surface of a stove. At that point a strong red tint pervades the scene. In other scenes flushed with sunlight, a yellow tone was used. Eastman, the premier film laboratory of the 1920s, produced a color chart with swatches composed of filmstrips that had been tinted during processing. These were used by filmmakers to determine the exact color for a scene. The film lab, named after George Eastman, was later known as Eastman Kodak following the introduction of a still camera whose shutter release was thought to make the sound, “kodak.” Pathé, another prominent film lab at the time, offered similar swatches. The film artist, familiar with the differences in color from lab to lab, would choose the colors that best fit the tone of the film.

Figure 4.11 Daddy Long Legs (1919)

Reproduced by permission of the Mary Pickford Institute for Film Education

Decades later, deep into advanced full-color film, wedges became the way of selecting drastic alterations in color or saturation. These involved superimposing two separate strips of film that were produced from the original negative and incrementally altering the combined color (or lack of) and density of the two strips in order to achieve a third quality. The film Made in Heaven (1987) required hundreds of wedges with varying degrees of desaturation to achieve the film’s tones.

Today, a simple move on a virtual slider or click of a value in a nonlinear editing system instantly alters contrast, hue, and saturation. This has translated to the realm of the DI (digital intermediate), produced during an online session, where the palette has increased to the point where a nearly endless number of possible color and density combinations exist. Colors that could not have been achieved through the combination of red, green, and blue on the film printer’s butterfly values are now instantly available in the digital realm.

You Must Remember This

Film began as a truly handmade medium. Each Moviola was hand built and the films that were cut on it were meticulously assembled by the white-gloved hands of editors. Hard as it may be for today’s editors to believe, since they are accustomed to hundreds of virtual buttons and commands, the Moviola had only two main switches: on/off and forward/reverse. With that device Casablanca (1942), Gone With the Wind (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), The Graduate (1967), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and hundreds of other extraordinary films were edited over the course of six decades. In recent years, the Steven Spielberg film Munich (2005) saw its editor, Michael Kahn, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing. Despite the frenzy over electronic editing, Munich was cut on a Moviola at a time when most editors were already cutting on electronic systems—proof that it is not the machine but the filmmaker who ultimately makes the movie.