TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

While such technological developments were introducing some incremental changes to editing style, the technology of editing itself had remained more or less the same simple, mechanical process it had been when Reisz had originally written the book – and that it had been since the invention of cinema itself. While advances in other technical aspects of the cinema could be accommodated by editors, even exploited for more powerful effect, Reisz and Millar still effectively implied that editing itself should ideally remain as technologically simple as possible.

With the transitions that had taken place, for example as the Moviola was replaced by more complex “flatbed” systems, little about the editor’s task itself seemed to change in any basic sense. By the 1970s, though, a major transformation was already underway that was to profoundly alter the fundamental technology of editing. Its first signs could be seen in television production, where the electronic editing of videotape had become standard.

In his 1993 handbook Digital Nonlinear Editing, Thomas Ohanian describes the many different electronic non-linear editing systems that had become available by then. Editing was becoming part of complex computing systems, making it very different, and far less simple, than traditional film editing: “There is no computer in a film flatbed, just a series of motors, and film and magnetic track transports. When something goes wrong, it is usually a failed braking mechanism or a burned out bulb.”^[6] The new computer systems, by contrast, were much more difficult for an editor to understand. The inner workings, obscured from view, required a specialist knowledge to understand – and repair. Despite such technological complexity, though, Ohanian and others were for the most part enthusiastic about the benefits of the new systems.

But the transformation was, in many respects, a profound one. Very little had changed in the basic mechanical apparatus of film editing in the first ninety years of film history, yet in less than a decade it had been almost wholly altered. Earlier developments had not seemed to change anything fundamental. While the wielding of scissors and the application of glue had long been replaced by more intricate and complex, and specifically designed, purpose-built, mechanical systems, the basic tasks of editing remained straightforward. From the Moviola to the Steenbeck, film-strips were wound on wheels through rudimentary viewing screens, and physically cut and joined with glue or tape.

By the early 1990s, though, this basic procedure was quickly being displaced by computing systems that dispensed with the material necessity of cutting and splicing. Editors had to choose from the many very different non-linear digital systems available, which, despite their specific differences, all manifested a profound change to the basic tasks of editing, that were no longer strictly mechanical. Once film imagery was available in the form of digital information, there was no end to the possibilities for designing systems for the display and manipulation of that information, and for the first time in the history of editing, there was a quite wide variety of options.

So while editing technology had been quite singular – as almost all editors once used the Moviola, until it was replaced by flatbed systems, of which there were only a few basic models, the Steenbeck being the most popular – in the digital era there are many competing devices. Film editing systems were constrained by the physical fact of the linear film-strip, so that all systems had to run film-strips through the apparatus in basically the same way. But digital image information could be rendered in any manner conceivable, and be displayed and made available for manipulation in many different ways.

In his book, Ohanian describes videotape-based systems, such as BHP TouchVision, Ediflex, and Montage; laserdisc systems, like the CMX 6000, EditDroid, and Epix; and the purely digital systems, including the very popular and influential Avid system, but also DVision, EMC2, and Lightworks.