1. History and Development of Editing
Multimedia Assignment
Content Page
1. Purpose of editing.
2. How the very first film maker used editing.
3. The first individuals to experiment with editing.
4. The different types of editing techniques and principles used today.
5. The development of digital editing technology and techniques.
2. The Purposes Of
Editing
Editing has many purposes, including telling a story, creating a mood or creating
Atmosphere, all leading the success of a video/ film.
3. Editing concepts
Introducing New Information:
• A new shot should always present some new information to the viewer. In a
motion picture, this may primarily be visual information (a new character / a
different location) but it may also be aural (voice over / narration / important
sound).
• Editing is one of the most important steps in making a film, it is essential for
creating the desired mood, atmosphere and theme wanted by the director.
Motivation:
• The new shot you cut to, should provide new information, but so should the shot
you are cutting away from
• For example, a shot of a man looking in the air in amazement, then the scene
cuts to a shot of another man flying.
4. Why Edit?
Shot Composition:
• This is vital in making a scene make sense and keeping a scenes continuity
fluent.
• This could be arranging clips in an order that helps the shot keep to the
conventions of the genre and of film in general.
• E.g. using the 180 degree rule to help the scene make sense.
Continuity:
• Providing smooth, seamless continuity across transitions is a very important
element in an edits.
• Making sure the sequence makes sense throughout, whilst keeping the scene
interesting.
5. Editing
•All of these conventions can amount to engaging the the viewer, creating
motivation, developing drama, and creating pace.
• Overall, combining shot to create sequences gives us the basic term for editing, and doing it
correctly can lead to very rewarding results for a film, advert, propaganda, music video etc.
6. How the Very First Film Maker Used Editing
• The earliest films in the in the 1900’s were all done in camera, meaning there was
no editing involved, and the entire film was filmed in the order would be seen in
theatre, just one reel of film played at once.
• The Great Train Robbery is a 1903 Western film written, produced, and directed by
Edwin S. Porter. 12 minutes long, it is considered a milestone in film making.The
film used a number of innovative techniques including cross cutting, double
exposure composite editing, camera movement and on location shooting.
• Cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique for the time.Some prints
were also hand colored in certain scenes. None of the techniques were original to
The Great Train Robbery, and it is now considered that it was heavily influenced by
Frank Mottershaw's earlier British film A Daring Daylight Burglary.
8. The first individuals to experiment with editing
Three examples are: Griffiths, Eisenstein and Kuleshov
9. David Griffiths
• Considered the father of narrative cinema, D.W. Griffith practically invented
such techniques like parallel editing, pushing them to unprecedented levels of
complexity and depth.
• Griffith's work in the teens was highly regarded by Kuleshov and other Soviet
filmmakers and greatly influenced their understanding of editing.
• What became known as the popular 'classical Hollywood' style of editing was
developed by early European and American directors, in particular D.W. Griffith
in his films such as The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The classical style
ensures temporal and spatial continuity as a way of advancing narrative, using
such techniques as the 180 degree rule, Establishing shot, and Shot reverse
shot.
10. Lev Kuleshov
• Lev Kuleshov was among the very first to theorize about the relatively young
medium of the cinema in the 1920s. For him, the unique essence of the
cinema — that which could be duplicated in no other medium — is editing. He
argues that editing a film is like constructing a building. Brick-by-brick (shot-by-
shot) the building (film) is erected. His often-cited Kuleshov Experiment
established that montage can lead the viewer to reach certain conclusions
about the action in a film. Montage works because viewers infer meaning
based on context.
• He was a Soviet filmmaker and film theorist who taught at and helped establish
the world's first film school, the Moscow Film School.
• Although editing innovations, such as crosscutting were used by directors in
Hollywood before him, Kuleshov was the first to use it in the Soviet Russia.
• He studied the techniques of Hollywood directors, particularly D.W. Griffith and
Mack Sennett and introduced such innovations as crosscutting in editing and
montage into Russian cinema.
• Kuleshov remained quiet about this part of his career when he experimented
with editing technique. He focused on putting two shots together to achieve a
new meaning.
11. Eisenstein
• Sergei Eisenstein was briefly a student of Kuleshov's, but the two
parted ways because they had different ideas of montage. Eisenstein
regarded montage as a dialectical means of creating meaning. By
contrasting unrelated shots he tried to provoke associations in the
viewer, which were induced by shocks.
12. Eisenstein
Eisenstein describes five methods of montage in his introductory essay "Word and Image".
1. Metric - where the editing follows a specific number of frames (based purely on the
physical nature of time), cutting to the next shot no matter what is happening within the
image. This montage is used to elicit the most basal and emotional of reactions in the
audience.
2. Rhythmic - includes cutting based on continuity, creating visual continuity from edit to edit.
3. Tonal - a tonal montage uses the emotional meaning of the shots -- not just manipulating
the temporal length of the cuts or its rhythmical characteristics -- to elicit a reaction from
the audience even more complex than from the metric or rhythmic montage. For example,
a sleeping baby would emote calmness and relaxation.
4. Over tonal/Associational - the over tonal montage is the accumulation of metric, rhythmic,
and tonal montage to synthesize its effect on the audience for an even more abstract and
complicated effect.
5. Intellectual - uses shots which, combined, elicit an intellectual meaning.
13. The Development of Digital Editing Technology and
Techniques
• Starting in the late 1970s to the early 1980s, several video
equipments were introduced such as the TBC – Time Base Correctors
and digital video effects units. They operated by using standard
analog, it composed the video and then within digitalized it. This made
it easier to correct or enhance the video signal.
14. Linear Vs Non-Linear
• In the early days of electronic video production, linear (tape-to-tape) editing
was the only way to edit video tapes. Then, in the 1990s, non-linear editing
computers became available and opened a whole new world of editing power
and flexibility.
• Non-linear editing was not welcomed by everyone and many editors resisted
the new wave. In addition, early digital video was plagued with performance
issues and uncertainty. However, the advantages of non-linear video eventually
became so overwhelming that they could not be ignored.
15. Editing Hardware and Software
A computer system comprises hardware and software.
Hardware is the physical medium, for example:
• Circuit boards
• Processors
• Keyboards
Software are computer programs, for example:
• Operating system
• Editor
• Compilers
16. Tapeless Editing
• Tapeless editing is camcorder that is based on digital recording instead of tape.
These are stored as computer files onto data storage devices such as hard
drives and solid-state flash memory cards.
• Most consumer-level tapeless camcorders use MPEG-2, MPEG-4 video
compression or its derivatives as video coding formats. They are normally
capable of capturing still-images to JPEG formats.
