History and Development Of Editing
Now obviously there has been a significant increase in the power that editing software has, but where did it start and how did it get as strong as it is now? Well hopefully by the end of this you'll have gained a better understanding of editing in the industry and how it has grown to the powerhouse of today. (All evidence and links where I have found my information is at the end of this article)
We start with the earliest process back when film was actually on rolls and sectioned like a disposable camera, but before all of this modern technology films as I mentioned used to be physically cutting reels and sticking them back together with tape and then later would be glued, obviously a process like this is a very precise piece of work to avoid having to dip further into the budget in order to get it reprocessed in order to get the tape back. This would then provide the jumps helpful to boost along the story and act as almost an early version of a jumpcut.
This method obviously wasn't exactly a great thing for efficiency or timings but it was part of the ground breaking moment for the industry and the first instances for film making and moving pictures for wider audiences so of course it would then end up becoming almost the only way of making films.
However what makes the Moviola (the thing above) particularly unique is that it wasn't exactly as widely used as you might think on the surface. During this period of the editing there wasn't that many countries who used them, the most notable people would be the USSR, Germany and the US from which we can assume their allies too. All apart from Britain who instead used something different that was soon adopted by everyone.
While this next bit of machinery may look like the first version of a pre-historic DJ it's actually the next step in editing around the world but it actually starts in Europe. See during the 1930's when most of pretty much everywhere else was enamoured with what the Moviola could do, Europe moved on and started using the Flatbed (seen above) as their primary editing powerhouse.
What made this so great was it's almost full modern capabilities, such as being able to chop and link sequences back together and viewing the film and getting audio synced with it too as it allowed for magnetic audio (made by Germany in 1928 for recording sound that wasn't discovered by the Allies until they beat the Germans) to be played alongside making it one of the most significant developments in the media industry.
Now we get close to things of today starting with linear and nonlinear editing techniques, but what do I mean? Well on the face of it, the process is almost the same but what you use is different. It's the 1990's and everything is moving along quite rapidly including how we edit film but there are different ways and methods for doing so. In this case linear still uses tapes and cutting, keeping it in that straight line order and it's all linked from one thing to the next and if you want to change something then you have to be careful in how in case it gets damaged.
In contrast to this we have the similar albeit more modern choice of nonlinear editing which is all done digital, such as full digital recordings, editing on a computer etc., this is a more familiar version as now we have things such as Adobe which can sequence video captured.
It's time for a bit of logistics, by now almost all editing has moved to digital but linear and nonlinear still hold as an idea for editing sequences. The main thing that's changed is the steps, now called Online and Offline which doesn't have anything to do with the internet but rather the steps taken to get the process done, beginning with Offline. Offline is the initial step, making a rough draft of what the final product should and could look like for main editors and directors, this is never clean or in any sort of high definition because it's used for proof of concept or to help give ideas. It's also used to make an Editing Decision List (EDL) for the main editors who them work on increasing the definition, colour grading, implementing the list etc.
Online editing is where the main group sits, using high definition material to make the product using the EDL given by the offline editors, as mentioned before they do colourings (mainly corrections) but also add things like visual effects (possibly CGI) and other things too. It's easy to see why I called them the main group as they are responsible for the full making of the end product with assistance from the offline editors who help to provide the information and the baseline.
Here we are, modern era editing, from the starting points of things like the CMX keyboards which boosted nonlinear editing to an entirely different level to where it was at the beginning to Avid 1 which was designed in similar fashion to the Apple Macintosh II and boosted nonlinear editing even further and helped the design and software of what they were get boosted to today's places.
Now we don't have separate pieces of hardware for editing, it's all available to download from the internet but they all had those as a baseline and you can still see it, in Adobe and Final Cut Pro being able to take nonlinear scenes and moments and make them into a continuous flowing film. Being able to take audio and sync it with the images being played, then being able to watch the finished product which is reminiscent of where it all started.
Well that about covers it, hopefully now you know more about how much the industry has grown than when you started.
Have a great day!
Research credits:
https://www.sutori.com/story/the-history-of-editing-in-film--QJpt1BGzfkapALSCe9af3Upx
http://jholmeshnc.blogspot.com/2015/06/developments-in-editing-technology.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe7lssLns9Q&t=80s
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