Independent Project: Treatment

Digital Editing

Digital video editing is only 26 years old, and has been mainstream for just over 15 years.  Let’s take a look at some interesting dates in recent history in the exciting world of video editing!

Many younger editors have only ever experienced their craft as a digital endeavor, but anyone who has been editing since before the mid-90s certainly remembers the days of analog — when Steenbecks and Moviolas ruled the post-production world.  As with many computer-related innovations, there have been staggering advancements in digital editing over the past 26 years (which is when the first all-digital video editing and compositing system was introduced by Quantel.)

Digital Editing Firsts: Fun Facts

Let’s take a look at some interesting facts and dates about the beginning of the world of digital editing:

• 1985: Quantel released The “Harry.”  The Harry was the first all-digital video editing and effects compositing system.  Due to technical limitations, it could record and apply effects to a maximum of 80 seconds of 8-bit uncompressed digital video.
• 1987: Avid Technology created the Avid/1 Media Composer.  It was designed using the Apple Macintosh II computer platform, as well as proprietary Avid hardware and software.  (Clarification from Avid pioneer, Michael Phillips, in the Comments section of this post:  The Avid/1 Media Composer was actually developed on the Apollo computer, which is where Avid’s founders worked before forming Avid as a company.  It was then built on the Macintosh II, which is what it shipped with in the company’s first official release in December 1989.) The Avid/1 Media Composer was a revolutionary design, but it was not the first NLE that used modern concepts like clip bins and Timeline editing (these were introduced with Lucasfilm’s EditDroid, a computerized analog NLE from the early 1980s).
• 1989: Avid Technology publicly introduced the Avid/1 Media Composer at NAB to great fanfare.  The codec used for editing on Avid was the Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) codec, which became the primary video editing codec of the early 90′s.  It was not very high quality, but it worked fine for offline editing.
  
  http://youtu.be/Bzy94vWUitE

• 1991:  Adobe released Premiere 1.0 for the Mac.
• 1992: First feature film, Let’s Kill All the Lawyers, was digitally edited using the Avid.  Up until this point, only short-form videos and commercials could be edited because of hard drive capacity limitations.
• 1993:  Media 100 entered the market as a low-cost digital video editing solution.  Media 100 offered steady advancements in compression technology, and continued to develop higher video resolutions focusing primarily via software innovation, rather than hardware.
• 1994-95: By 1994, only three feature films had been edited digitally, but by 1995, the number had grown to hundreds.  This time has become known as the distinct shift in the digital editing revolution.
• 1995:  The DV codec and IEEE-1394 (FireWire 400) brought huge advancements to digital video recording, capturing and editing.
• 1996: The English Patient was the first digitally edited film to win an Oscar for Best Editing (edited by Walter Murch on the Avid).
• 1999: Apple released Final Cut Pro, which soon became a chief competitor to Avid.  (Final Cut Pro was developed after Apple bought Keygrip, which had been a product designed for Macromedia by several ex-Adobe employees.)
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS6pjJ4eiVY

• 2001: The Rules of Attraction, was the first feature film edited using Final Cut Pro.
• 2007: No Country for Old Men was the first Oscar-winning film edited using Final Cut Pro.  (Roderick Jaynes was also nominated for an Oscar in best editing.)

Your Digital Journey

Have you always edited digitally?  If not, where were you in your career when the digital editing revolution took over?  What do you miss about the days of flatbed editing?

- See more at: http://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/fun-facts-and-dates-in-digital-editing-firsts/#sthash.nqv0yXqH.dpuf

French New Wave Editing

What is French New Wave Cinema?

French New Wave filmmakers such as Jean Luc Godard and François Truffaut pushed the limits of editing technique during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s

French New Wave films and the non-narrative films of the 1960s used a carefree editing style and did not conform to the traditional editing etiquette of Hollywood films.

French New Wave editing often drew attention to itself by its lack of continuity, its self-reflexive nature (reminding the audience that they were watching a film), and by the overt use of jump cuts or the insertion of material not often related to any narrative.

Conventions of French New Wave Cinema

¨A rejection of classical montage-style filmmaking

¨Focus on the mise-en-scene

¨A conviction that the best films are a personal artisic expression and should bear the stamp of personal authoship.

¨Low budget.

¨Presented in black and white.

¨Natural lighting

¨Liberation from the tripod (hand-held shots)

http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ogaycken/clips/breathless-jump-cuts.mp4/view

Editing Contextual Study

To achieve P1, M1, D1 of Unit 2 "use appropriate techniques to extract comprehensive information from written sources" you need to use a variety of websites and books to gain information on editing.

Remember write down the website where you got the information, so we can create a reference list at the end of the document, powerpoint or video presentation.

Here are some more helpful websites

Use appropriate techniques to extract comprehensive information from written sources

The past three excellent lessons on the blog! www.cmpwc.blogspot.com

http://video101course.com/editing.html

http://nofilmschool.com/2014/02/video-the-history-of-editing-eisenstein-the-soviet-montage-explained

http://www.infoplease.com/cig/movies-flicks-film/fade-brief-history-editing.html

http://www.indiewire.com/article/watch-vsevolod-pudovkins-5-editing-techniques

http://thescriptlab.com/features/the-lists/800-top-10-best-of-film-montages

This is not a comprehensive list and you can use many more.

Editing Contextual Study

Editing Contextual Study

Either present the information as;

• Word Document
• PPT
• Audio/Visual Report (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si7rdUlkRsc)

You need to cover the following questions

• Define: What is editing?
• Overview of the history of editing
• Different editing styles (montage, in-camera, experimental, parallel, french new wave)
• What is classic hollywood editing? Also known as invisible editing
• What are the classic hollywood editing traits: 180' rule, eye-line, shot-reverse-shot
• What are the different editing transitions?
• Why edit - what is the purpose? how does it make meaning?
• Distinction: Analyse a specific scene and discuss how the editing makes meaning.

This wikipedia article is helpful as a starting point (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_editing) 

According to Walter Murch, when it comes to film editing, there are six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are (in order of importance, most important first, with notional percentage values.):

• Emotion (51%) — Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?
• Story (23%) — Does the cut advance the story?
• Rhythm (10%) — Does the cut occur "at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'" (Murch, 18)?
• Eye-trace (7%) — Does the cut pay respect to "the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame" (Murch, 18)?
• Two-dimensional plane of the screen (5%) — Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?
• Three-dimensional space of action (4%) — Is the cut true to the physical/spatial relationships within the diegesis?

Editing Lesson 3

Block A - City Of God (Theory Test)

Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4HUydk0kII

How does City of God create meaning through the use of different editing techniques?

• Define editing?
• What editing techniques have they used?
• What types of transitions are used?
• What is the pace of the scene? Is there different paces?
• How does the sound link to the visuals?
• What is the intended meaning?
• What is your point of view?