History and Development of Editing Multimedia Assignment

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.

Content Page

The Purposes Of Editing

Editing has many purposes, including telling a story, creating a mood or creatingAtmosphere, all leading the success of a video/ film.

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.

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.

Why Edit?

•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.

Editing

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.

The different types of editing techniques and principles used today.

Three examples are: Griffiths, Eisenstein and Kuleshov

The first individuals to experiment with editing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The end

Thanks for listening!