2018

Video Editing
Ethan Serapio
MR. KOSHMAN, CLC 11
ETHAN SERAPIO 784169
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“Video editing is the process of manipulating and rearranging video shots to create new work,”

([Link] 2012). Video editing has been a crucial process to bring the movies you see

today to life. From movies, to YouTube vlogs, to YouTube games, to class video projects you

will have to edit parts of it on the way. Recording videos and editing videos go hand in hand, and

doesn’t seem right to film a video without recording it.

Video editing dates back in 1904, although it isn’t the editing you do on computers, it’s different

from what you think. “Early on the cuts were made in the camera, so that the cameraman would

simply stop cranking at the exact end of a shot, and begin cranking again when it was moved

somewhere else, or when something else was put in front of it. This kind of editing could allow

for some early special effects. In movies he is making at the turn of the century, Georges Méliès

stops the camera after detonating a magic puff of smoke in front of his actor, then begins the

camera again after the actor has left the stage, making it seem as if the actor has magically

vanished.” ([Link] 2001).

Back then –around 1904- they didn’t have computers or editing software, they simply stopped

rolling and edited on the fly. Later on, “For Love of Gold,” filmed by D.W Grithins, was the first

film to be continuous between scenes. “ D.W Grithins Film ‘For Love of Gold’ featured the first

ever continuity cut between scenes. He also discovered that you can reflect emotion through

different angles and the pace of editing, it wasn’t all down to the editors. The birth of a nation,

1915 is the first film that used a variety of camera techniques. Including long panoramic shots,

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iris effect, still shots, cross cutting and planning shots.” ([Link] 2015). Editing isn’t the

only thing that makes a film enjoyable, it’s also the camera work.

In the early 1900’s, sound finally came to play in movies. Without sound people wouldn’t get the

same vibe or feeling while watching the movie. “The first sound recording cameras had to be

used in a sound proof room. They also were very still as the actor had speak into a static mic. It

took a while before people realised that they could move the microphone round on the end of a

stick.” ([Link] 2015). Analogue editing shortly came after. Before computers, all editing

was done by hand. “You had a copy of the positive film where all the footage went onto when it

was filmed. They then took the film and cut it in different parts using a splicer and pasted it onto

different pieces of film to create the cutaways. With analogue editing it then had to be fed

through a machine.” ([Link] 2012/11).

Filming used to be very expensive, and any unused footage was big waste of money. “Aside

from the expense, film is impossible to reuse. That means a day of shooting must have footage

the crew can use, or else every resource consumed that day was a waste.” ([Link] 2015) Not

only was filming expensive before modern technology, but post filming was tedious as well.

“adding visual effects to film was often a precise art, where the effect had to blend seamlessly

with what was being shot. This was a painstaking process that editors no longer go through.”

([Link] 2015) With modern technology, you no longer need to break your back during post

production. With digital effects, you can add them directly to the video in the program. “Digital

effects are created and added to the shot within the same program or family of programs. This

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software also allows editors to work on entire sections of a film, easily piecing scenes together

after the post production effects are added in.” ([Link] 2015)

Video editing had another breakthrough with the use of offline editing. “It all changed again

when offline video editing became common in the 1980s; for film editors, it was a retrograde

step. Offline editing, usually done on U-matic 3/4” tape, was basically a case of recording from

one machine to another. This meant it was a linear process — to change two shots around or to

trim a couple of frames off a shot in a sequence, so easy to do on film, would mean reassembling

everything or going another tape generation — which meant very often it just wouldn’t be done.”

([Link] 2018) This meant editing could be done faster and easier.

With non-linear editing, you can edit any piece of footage anytime. You don’t have to edit in

order of time filmed, and it doesn’t take hours to edit, just a few little clicks with a mouse.

Editors also have the freedom of taking their footage anywhere with the introduction of hard disk

drives. “Non-linear editing completely changes the rules, and it changes them in your favor.

Instead of building a program in sequence one shot at a time, non-linear systems let you work on

any part of a program at any time. Changes that may take hours or even days on a linear system

may take nothing more than a few mouse clicks with non-linear. Where linear editing makes you

wait for tapes to cue up, non-linear gives you instant access to whatever clip you want, whenever

you want it. How do they make this editing magic possible? By transferring the video from raw

footage tapes onto hard disks inside a computer. Once inside the computer, the possibilities for

manipulating the video literally become endless.” ([Link] 1995)

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With the use of non-linear editing, you can add effects, layers and transitions to the footage, this

is a huge step forward into video editing and a good example of how technology benefited the

video editing world. “Many non-linear software packages let you transform digital video using

effects identical to many broadcast linear systems. You can perform effects like dissolves,

multiple layers, squeezes, glass breaks--you name it.” ([Link] 1995)

On the topic of going onto digital editing, video taping also became digital. This is the

breakthrough that made digital editing possible. No film reel, or tape, just all on a hard drive,

disk or even SD card. It made it faster to start the editing process. “Since it started to become

mainstream in the early part of this century, tapeless has revolutionized video production

workflows. Before tapeless, cameras stored footage on video tape. To then edit on the footage,

the footage had to be transferred from the tape onto a hard disk recorder. This was slow as it

relied on a mechanical operation like fast forward, rewind, eject, copy and so on to happen.

Tapeless removed all that and you could quickly move between and within clips.” ([Link]

2013)

Despite the breakthrough of electronic video editing, it still kept most editors far from the finish

product. Automated edit controllers automate most of the process of editing making the work a

lot lighter for editors. “It wasn't until small edit controllers appeared in the late 1960s that editors

could more closely address the art of assembling programs on videotape. The first edit

controllers automated most of the editing process. They marked edit points electronically,

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prerolled the machines, and triggered the record circuit at the edit point. Some could even

preview an edit before recording it. They were accurate enough to get within a few frames of the

intended edit point.” ([Link] 1995)

There is still a problem with digital video editing, if an editor wanted to find a certain scene in

the footage, they would have to rewind the footage to the start and reset the counter before

searching for the scene they wanted. “The solution to this tedious problem came from a

technology called time code. First developed in 1967 by a company called EECO, it was based

on a system used by NASA to "time tag" telemetry tapes. Each frame of video had the hour,

minute and second recorded with it. Engineers could easily find specific pieces of data by going

through these numbers.” ([Link] 1995)

Many production companies paid a lot of money, because editors caused damage to the original

footage during editing. With the use of VTR, stands for Video Tape Recorders, which allowed

editors to watch the original footage while the VTR recorded the footage. Still this new solution

also wasn’t cheap as companies still have to pay for the disks they stored the footage on. “The

first digital editing software that was electronic was the VTR created by Ampex corp. This

enabled the editor to watch the original tape whilst the VTR recorded the desired shots. The

advantage to this is that less damage is caused to the tape from manual handling and the original

tape is preserved for future use. In 1963 Ampex went on to develop the system so it was able to

mark the tape electronically. This enabled video animation by using editing to frame by frame

shift-editing points. The main break through came in 1970 when the CMX600 was created. It

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was the first digital disk based editing system. The system worked by using magnetic computer

disks that were designed to store analogue video. The down sides to this software were that only

5 minutes could be stored on one disk, it didn't cope well with dissolves and

was extremely expensive.” ([Link] 2012)

With all these advancements in video editing with the use of technology, we can edit faster,

better, and get amazing results like we see with movies in the movie theatres today. We no

longer must physically cut and move around film reels, we can do it digitally. “To be honest,

filming and editing video is a new concept, relative to time. In just over a hundred years, people

have gone from using scissors and tape to trim unnecessary footage to the computer based non-

linear techniques of today. For the first eighty plus years editing was done using the linear

method. The linear method of editing involves arranging images and sounds in order. At the

beginning, this did involve using scissors to splice the footage and then using tape to attach it in

the correct order. Methods like this were used until the 1920’s, when the first editing machine,

called the Moviola, was invented.” ([Link] 2017) No more fuss with scissors

and tape.

Video recording didn’t have to be filmed on reels anymore and instead could be filmed on hard

drives and disks to go straight ahead into digital video editing. “Up to the 1970s, all recording

technology depended on creating a physical analogue, whether on tape or disk, of the original

sound waves. Despite many incremental improvements to these techniques, by the 1970s, further

reductions in noise and distortion were becoming increasingly difficult and expensive.”

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([Link] 2007) “The first digital tape recorder was demonstrated in Japan in

1967, with the first digitally mastered records appearing on the Denon label in 1972. The first

commercially available digital audio recorder was the Sony PCM-1. Introduced in 1977, the

PCM-1 converted an incoming analogue signal into a digital one, which was then recorded onto

a standard video cassette in a VCR. Initially, digitally mastered records were still released on

vinyl disks in the analogue format. In 1982, however, Sony and Philips released the first compact

discs and players.” ([Link] 2007) This eliminated the hassle tape recordings and

pain of editing film reels. Straight to a disk instead and easy to edit and export.

Video recording and editing are evolving each day with constant updates to software and

hardware, making the possibilities of editing and filming endless. In addition, with the world

wide web, video editing for personal and commercial use will be more efficient. With all the

resources you can use from online, video editing can be a lore more smooth and easier. “if you

wanted to get help on a project you’d either call somebody over to your cubical or give someone

you know a call and try to explain your dilemma. Today there are so many online resources

like training tips (I.e. Google: How do I extrude a 3d shape in After effects) or Royalty-free

video clips (the prices are dropping and the quality is increasing very fast – why go out and shoot

a reference clip of a city if you can download a great aerial shot for $100 or $10 or $1 or for free

– remember that everything trends to free online…) and collaborative tools (either integrated

tools like Adobe anywhere or AVID Everywhere or Autodesk 360 or stand-alone tools

like Wispter, Remark, and Vidmaker ) that allow video producers to be more efficient in their

jobs.” ([Link] 2015) Creativity, passion, and fun is endless with the use of video

editing.

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