Development of Editing Technology

Editing is used in order to put together pieces of footage in order to form a cohesive narrative. The first films in cinema contained no editing, and would be shot in one continuous take, which as you can imagine was tedious for actors and film makers alike. One of the first films to use editing was Georges Méliès' 'A Trip To The Moon'(1914), and the editing techniques used in this time period were very basic, involving the editor physically cutting film reels with a razor blade and pasting them together with glue and tape. This task was long winded and tedious, but without this basic form of editing we would not have the software that is commonly used by film makers today. This method of editing was used until 1924, when the Moviola was born. This piece of technology allowed for much smoother, easier editing, but also brought in edge numbering, which allowed for audio and video to be edited simultaneously.

Steenbeck later invented the flatbed editing suite, which took the world of editing by storm. The flatbed suite allowed an editor to view and edit footage, allowing for much more precise editing. In 1953, the Steenbeck flatbed 16mm 4 plate was introduced, the ST200. This 'new media' added optical sound and allowed for playback of 16mm perforated magnetic tape. In 1954, the ST100 was introduced, which allowed for the editing of 35mm film. Soon after, the first editing suite with a built in back projector came out, the ST400, which was followed by the ST500 switchblade, allowing for standard and cinemascope footage.

Kinescope recordings came about during the 1940's, which is at its roots a camera recording a video screen of a live broadcast, but this came with many technical downsides, such as banding and ghosting.

The next pioneering step in editing technology was when Ampex released the first 2" quadruplex video tape in 1956. This type of film allowed for editors to see the magnetic strip in the tape, so allowed for much more precision in editing. The con of this, however, is that video and audio could not be edited at the same time, as they were too far apart in the editing machine, so they therefore had to edit the video first and then put the audio back in it's corresponding place. Another problem is that with linear editing, it became a hassle when trying to re-edit pieces of footage, as you would have to edit over an old edit, therefore some of the old footage may remain over the new footage.

1971 saw the next game changing invention of the editing world, the CMX 600. Only six of these machines were ever invented, but they paved the way for non-linear editing. In 1989, the Avid 1 was produced, and having now overcome linear editing problems, they now were faced with the problem of having to store so much raw footage, so in 1993 Avid released a 7 terabyte system to overcome this issue. Non linear systems require two things, computer power and data storage, however non linear systems take significantly less time to use, which lessens production costs greatly as editors have some of the highest wages in film making.

Digital editing took the world by storm, as it could improved the quality of editing as a whole, as it was easier to add special effects, the footage is resistant to noise and chatter and is easy to copy and sync. 1990 saw the birth of New Trek's 'Video Toaster' on the Omega system, which had limited linear editing capabilities, however brought editing to schools and many low budget television studios. In 1995, the DVD was created, along with a new type of compression, MPEG-2. A year later, the first HD broadcast was made in the US, the process of which involved feeding a piece of 35mm footage through a telecine, which creates a digital copy of this footage, which could then be manipulated with special effects etc and converted back to film.

Since digital editing has become more and more popular, the editing world has never turned back, however it wasn't until 2002 that the first film was shot pure digitally, and this was Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones. Later that decade allowed for films to be shot digitally and edited completely online, therefore independent film makers have been growing in number more and more in recent years.