After many years of working on the Avid Media Composer, and several years of working professionally in Final Cut Pro, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Media Composer is the digital equivalent of the Moviola, the primary tool of professional editors for generations. Final Cut Pro can’t make this claim and here I’ll explain one of the reasons why.

Invented in 1924, the Moviola was an editing device used to cut celluloid film. It was originally designed to be a home movie projector, but when sales didn’t take off, it was redesigned specifically to edit motion pictures. You threaded the film on the big, black (and later green) machine and you could run shots and sequences back and forth, pretty much until the sprockets wore out (and they did). The Moviola was a clackety, loud apparatus and if you weren’t careful, you could catch your finger in the threading mechanism. Having done this personally on several occasions I can assure you it wasn’t pleasant. My point being that editing on a Moviola was a much more physical experience than editing on a computer. This, of course, is true of so many of the work tasks digital technologies have replaced.

The physicality of cutting on a Moviola was also demonstrated by the fact that many editors stood at their Moviola. While reviewing the film, shot or sequence, the editor would mark the film with a grease pencil (a thick, greased-based marker, which you could wipe off the film) take it out of the threading mechanism and physically make your cut. This technique worked well and the modest machine was the de facto standard of the editing craft for many, many years.

However, the real magic of working on the Moviola was finding your cut point. Equipped with an actual hand-brake, it enabled you to find your cut point, and stop the machine on the exact frame you desired. This was (and still is) critically important. As an editor you become physically as well as mentally immersed in the material. Filmmakers talk about “feeling” the cut and I’ve known many editors who would sway with the rhythms of the action or dialog while cutting. It is almost like a dance, the film being your partner and when you were really in sync with your partners rhythms, you were really in the zone.

I know many readers are saying, so what does this have to do with Avid vs. Final Cut Pro?

Cut Point: The Moviola's Trusty Handbrake

Final Cut Pro has always suffered from something called “latency”. Latency in digital editing simply means that when you attempt to mark or stop on a specific frame (i.e. Moviola’s hand-brake) the software takes a moment to respond. It can also be observed when you play something in the timeline and it runs out of sync. This is especially true with some of the newer compressed HD formats hitting the market and is a complete deal breaker for almost all professional editors. The worst part about latency is that it tends to break the flow or, once again, the rhythm of the work.

This is one of several reasons that 99% of all major motion pictures continue to be cut on the Avid. You can stop and mark on a dime with no latency. This is true when working in a cut sequence or simply trimming a clip. Avid editors have the added ability to mark in or out continuously, in rapid-fire succession if they choose without the software exhibiting as much as a flinch. This has held true since the first day I worked on the Avid in 1992. Many FCP stalwarts argue that latency isn’t a problem. I don’t want to burst their bubble, but I’ve been working in the trenches with the software for the last several years and it just ain’t so. These folks have either never cut anything rhythmically or don’t understand what it is.

Final Cut Pro is a terrific product, I particularly admire the fact that it has enabled so many to gain a deeper understanding of the editing craft. However, if it ever is going to grab a larger share of the studio filmmaking pie, it will have to address the latency issue as well as several other non-intuitive functions that hinder its adoption by the majority of professional editors.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll discuss another of Final Cut Pro’s Achilles heels…Trimming

Overlapping is used in editing most any kind of story. In it’s most basic definition it refers  to having non-aligned cut points for adjoining sound and picture tracks as highlighted in red above.  This would be distinguished from a “straight cut”, where all tracks have an aligned cut point, as demonstrated within in the yellow highlight.

The term originated in the days of editing celluloid film, when the editor would physically extend the sound or picture and have it “lap over” the incoming or outgoing corresponding frames. Now of course we do this virtually in our editing software’s timeline. Avid’s Media Composer is a bit more intuitive when it comes to allowing to do overlaps naturally, as the tracks are always treated as being “unlinked” (or double system for you old-timers). On the other hand when working in FCP, all picture and sound tracks are linked by default. However, linking and unlinking are easily invoked in Final Cut with the keyboard shortcut, Shift-L.

Sidenote: Avid-trained editors are bound to get tripped up at first by Linked Selection vs. Clip Linking. These are two different functions, which can and do work together, but if you’re ever at you’re wits end and just want to move a piece sound separately from a piece of picture invoke shift-L or Edit menu > check or uncheck the Linked Selection option (fig. 3).

The overlap cut has a variety of uses. I employ it often simply to smooth out the sound transition of a cut. For example, let’s say you have a dialog scene between two people. If the audio ambiances of the two camera angles are badly mismatched, straight cuts between the two can have a distracting effect, jarring you out of the scene. Overlapping, or in this case “pre-lapping” the dialog for each cut can help you hide the difference between the two ambiances. This is also known as “masking” the cut. Of course now, digitally, you can enhance this smoothing effect even more by adding small 2-6 frame audio dissolves (fig. 4) not to mention by adding additional ambiance (background) tracks. Filmmakers also use the overlap as a way to usher an audience more immediately into a new scene by placing some of its audio under the last few shots of the the scene that is ending or other non-sync shots from the next one.

Sound editors make wide use of overlapping when preparing dialog and sound effects tracks for a mix. Often the objective is to make the whole track seamless from beginning to end. Here sound designers and mixers work with pre and post-lapped tracks to make the audio environment they are creating a cohesive whole. Overlaps are used both as a means of smoothing dialog as mentioned above, and also as a way to change the nature or character of a transition. Crickets could inform your audience the story is transitioning to something quiet or calm. Thunder, laughter or crying would create other types of foreshadowing. Combine all of them, ad reverb and… well you get the idea.  Thoughtfully placing music so it leads us into a new scene, or has the scene remain with the audience after it has finished takes advantage of the cinematic effect of overlapping in much the same way.

In the broadest sense, creating picture and sound collages or montages is what editors do. Overlapping is an extension of the concept of montage. The overlap and other editorial techniques are designed to keep your audience immersed in the film experience and fully invested in your story.

Today I profile storage supplier Dulce Systems, specifically their new ProRX RAID solution for Final Cut Pro and other high data-rate creative applications. Dulce has a reputation as being one of the best and most reliable vendors in the storage marketplace, and as this profile demonstrates, they have long and extensive knowledge of mass storage products and their customers needs. I sat down with their DoTS (Director of Technical Stuff) Robert Leong who gave me the details on the ProRX. Enjoy.

Click Here for a Window Media Version of this segment

Today we sit down and talk with Jeff Youel, President of Wafian Corporation about his HR-F1, Direct-to-Disk digital field recorder. This is truly one of the new tools with the potential to change the face of digital film and HD video production. The HR-F1 is the “Field Unit” version of the company’s complete line of D2D recorders so it’s smaller, lighter and can be configured with a shock-resistant enclosure. It’s also the first portable D2D recorder that captures and plays back up to 10 hours of 24p footage at 10-bit 4:2:2 HD-SDI utilizing the Cineform Intermediate Codec.

Jeff and I also get a chance to talk about Wafian’s other products including their HR-1 mirrored studio unit, their HR-2 Dual-Link (2K) 4:4:4 unit and their newest product the HR-2-DS, a 10-bit, dual-stream stereoscopic HD-SDI recorder for 3D digital film workflows. Take a look!

Click Here if you would like a Window Media version of this segment.

Here is Part III of our interview with Dan Lebental.

In this segment Dan gives us some great insights into the feature film editorial process. We discuss topics such as what it’s like screening the “first cut” with the director and starting out on the directors cut, bringing the length of IRON MAN down from 3.5 to it’s final running time of 2 hours, exploring variations of the film and reinventing scenes, and something he fondly refers to as “index card death row”. We also get to talk a bit more about his long term working relationship with director Jon Favreau, getting the studio involved and the editorial muse. Finally we discuss an issue that confronts directors and editors on many visual effects films, the time quandary. Specifically, the amount of time it takes from the director’s contractual (DGA) 10 week cut to lock VFX sequences and get them in the “pipeline”.

Today we present Part II of my interview with Dan Lebental, film editor of Paramount Pictures and Marvel Entertainment’s, IRON MAN.

In this segment Dan talks about his experience cutting on the Avid Media Composer, working with the visual effects team (upwards of 800 people) at ILM and the economics and intricacies of cutting a film with nearly 1000 visual effects shots. We go on to discuss the state of, and need for, industry accepted digital post production workflows. Finally, we talk about cutting IRON MAN utilizing the Avid DNX36 codec, and his first experience cutting a studio feature in HD. Enjoy.

Last Friday, I had the good fortune to visit the offices of Dan Lebental’s editing company, Splice-Inc. in midtown Los Angeles. Many of you know that Dan was the “film” editor of this summer’s first box office breakout hit, “Iron Man”. Not only is the film doing incredibly well in theaters, but it has also become one of the most critically acclaimed pictures in the genre.

Posted here is the first of our 3-part interview with Dan. In it, Dan tells us how he initially became interested in film editing, his “big break” which made him one of the most sought after music video editors of the early nineties, and how he developed a working relationship with director Jon Favereau.

On crutches and awaiting knee surgery, Dan was kind enough to give us an insider’s perspective of what it is like to participate in such a massive creative endeavor.

You will need Apple’s QuickTime 7 to view this properly.

I agree with him whole heartedly, and feel that many software and hardware vendors have contributed to the problem by calling their products “editors”. As if human editors don’t have enough of a problem garnering respect, they now have to contend with advertising and marketing copy professing that it’s the software or hardware which does the editing, not an actual person. This is one of the drawbacks of the digital filmmaking revolution. The perception that technology obviates the need for the person, or that any person will do once you acquire a certain piece of technology.

Editing is and always has been a highly technical craft, but it is also an art form. To quote wikipedia, it is “the only art that is unique to cinema and which separates filmmaking from all other art forms that preceded it.” As editors, I think we need to start asserting ourselves more as artists. Yes, our work requires mastering a complex skill set. But this is only part of what it is to be an editor. The reality is, it’s not until we have some mastery of the technical aspects of our craft, not until they have become second nature to us, that we can become truly immersed in our work. This is the point where we have the ability to get in “the zone” and enable ourselves to let our imaginations and instincts run free.

The question becomes, not only why isn’t this fixed? But why did I need to waste so much time crashing and searching the web, when a simple, understandable error message about the OMF file size limit would have solved the problem immediately?