The Technological Transformations of Editing - Text 5
He concludes with descriptions of then brand-new digital audio and video formats for personal computers, such as QuickTime, but also higher-quality DVI and JPEG formats. A transformation had occurred, so that editing now meant accessing imagery in digital form, through “a computer display showing footage while the user interacts, not with machinery, but with computer software.”[7]
While an editor could choose the system that provided the most intuitive and simplest access to, or display of, the “footage” being edited, the software system behind the interface is vastly more complex than the earlier mechanical systems. For the most part, though, digital editing systems, while much more technologically complex and various than those, have in fact been designed to make editing seem as simple as it has always been, to allow for the editor and filmmaker to focus on the formal and aesthetic tasks.
Little seems in fact to have changed. Still, there is a widespread sense, among filmmakers and editors, as well as many film theorists, that the shift to digital editing has changed something fundamental about the very nature of the cinema, and that the change has something to do with the altered material state of the medium.
But the impression of a radical break, or a profound transformation with the introduction of digital technologies, is an effect of a specific historical understanding of the cinema and of the effects of technical change. Histories are often informed by certain basic theoretical assumptions about the nature of the cinema, about its material or technical basis. If changes occur that seem to alter that basis, or to incorporate elements that seem alien to it, there is a temptation to declare that what follows is wholly different from what came before.
