The Development of Editing

Eadweard Muybridge

Edward James Muybridge was an English photographer in 1868 who was important for his pioneering work in the studies of motion and in-motion picture projection. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878 when he used lors of cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs.

This image is an example of the type of in-motion picture editing he studied. He would take a series of images that when put together would move.

This is one of his images that he took using the in-motion method that were set to motion in 2006. When you put his images together they would all appear to be moving. He used a series of camera stills which when played back would create an illusion of movement.


Frames and Frame Rates

Frame rate is also known as frame frequency. Frame rate is the frequency rate at which an imaging device produces unique continuous images called frames. Frame rate is most often shown in frames per second (FPS) and is also shown in progessive scan monitors as hertz (Hz).  In the industry standard filming and projection formats are 24 frames per second. Shooting at a slower frame rate creates fast motion when projected and shooting at a higher frame rate than 24 frames per second would create slow motion when projected. We still use frame rate to adjust the speed of timing in production and post production today. The first flm cameras were a roll of film which moved frames mechinically past a shutter and lens system.
The Lumiere Brothers invented them in France and Thomas Edison invented them in America.

We still use the idea of frame rate to adjust speed of timing in production and post production today. The first film cameras were a roll of film which moved frames mechanically past a shutter and lens system. These were invented in France by the Lumiere Brother and in America by Thomas Edison.

Using the first film cameras the films created by these were usually not edited, they were usually done in a one single shot from a single point of view.

This Kylie Minogue music video is shot using a single shot technique. This is basically where all the film footage is taken on one camera from a certain point of view that doesn't change. This means that there aren't multiple different camera angles.

In contrast to the Kylie Minogue music video this video by Pierce the Viel uses a variety of different shot choices and you can see the story that is being told from multiple points of view. This editing makes following the action more easier to watch and more appealing. You can tell that this is a multiple points of view edit because it's not all filmed on one camera and the angle changes quite frequently. This technique wasn't used until the concept of editing in camera was invented. 

The editing in camera technique is where the film is created shot by shot in the camera. This means that the whole film will be done on one camera where each different shot will represent something different for the video. When this was invented it meant that the videos would be more interesting instead of doing it all in one big take. 

Editing in camera still exists as a way of creating films. There is an event called Straight 8 films where a filmmaker must make an edited in camera movie on a single 8mm film cartridge. 

This is an example of one of the entries for this competition:

As you can see each frame is a different shot completely however it's all filmed from the same camera. This is because they make sure that they film each shot in order. 

Editing

After editing my own in camera edit I have realised how hard it must be to assemble a finished film in camera. Many other people must of thought it would be hard to judge where each shot should start and finish so that was when the early filmmakes decided to find a way to trim shoots and alter the order of shorter sections of film called clips. 

In the early days of movie production the idea of cutting up film and taping it back together to edit it was developed. For many years this technique was done by hand with just a pair of scissors and a magnifying glass. 

This is the type of film that would be cut. You can see a faint image on the strip and they would physically cut it with scissors and put it together to create the perfect film that they wanted.

Of course that technique would take time so that was when the first mechanical editing decks used to cut up and reassemble movies were invented by Iwan Serrurier in 1924. He then founded the Moviola company. 

This is a photo of the mechanical editing decks that he created. After these machines were created they revolutionised editing and allowed more neater cutting techniques to be invented. 

The technique of cutting film and putting it back together, whether by hand of with the help of a machine is called Linear Editing. The reason it is called this is because you are assembling the clips one after another, the process is purely mechanical. Linear editing is editing that is done post production with the process of selecting, arrange and modifying images in a ordered sequence. 

From 1920 until the end of the Second World War film editing was mainly done on the Moviola editing decks. After this it was in 1945when the German company Steenbeck introduced their machine. The Steenbecks became the industry standard, being more popular. 

The Steenbeck editing technique still continues to this very day, the company Steenbeck still produce and sell the editing decks. 

This is a quick sped up video of two guys editing on the Steenbeck machine, as you can see it takes a lot of work and is more complicated than editing on the more known softwares that we use more commonly now.

Invention of video editing

The idea of recording something other than film, such as video tape was invented in 1951 by the Ampex research team. The companys first tape recorder was shipped in April 1984 and these were used to record the first ever US delayed radio broadcast of The Bing Crosby Show. Ampex tape recorders revolutionized the radio and recording industries because of their superior audio quality and ease of operation over audio disk cutting lathes. 

The first video editing machine also was invented a few years later in 1956. Ampex created a device which was known as helical scanning. In this scheme, the rotating head drum ran essentially perpendicular to a 2-inch-wide (51 mm) tape, and the slices recorded across the tape were nearly perpendicular to the tape's motion.

Recording an entire field in a single pass allowed these machines to play back a viewable still frame when the tape was stopped, and display a viewable image sequence while shuttling forwards or backwards. This greatly facilitated the editing process.

These video editing systems are also linear because of it's mechanical process. However these were different because instead of physically cutting the tape the data was copied from one tape to another from the control desk, which would control the in and out points of the clips you wanted to copy across.

At this point the image quality and editing techniqiues were very old and still at the early stage so they were mainly used for TV usage as the picture quality and sound quality was not good enough for cinema use. 

Non-liner Editing Systems (NLE)

The very first attemps to create non-liner editing systems were in the 1970's but no one was able to bring a commerical system to the market.
Lucasfilm started to develop an editing system in the 1980's with the software EditDroid which was based on laser disk technology. This technique was never turned into a commerical system though.

The first successful and professional non linear system was created in the 1989 when AVID launched the Avid 1 Media Composer editing system. The avid editing system was a hardware and software system based on Apple Computer Technology.

This is a screen shot of what the software looks like when you are editing in it.
This program was the first computer based system that had the ability to turn taped date into computerized files that could be then moved about on a timeline, which is shown in the picture above.
One of the major developments that allowed this to happen was the creation of a digital video camera which was the Sony D1 which started selling in 1986.

The main thing that started the big change from linear to non-linear editing was the idea that their could be a video or audio file that could be transformed into a piece of digital information which could then be altered without destroying the original file. This method is called Non Destructive Editing because it's all digital and you won't be destroying any important tapes. 

Once the images were digital it became possible to alter and manipulate the data file without destroying anything in ways that were impossible using linear editing systems.

The main advantages of using digital editing is that it's faster to locate the clips you want to edit and the fact that it is non-destructive is very important.