History of Video Editing

The first emerging films were all one long, static and locked-down shot. Motion in the shot was enough to amuse audiences, so the first films featured no story and required no editing.

The Lumière brothers were the first ones to use film as a source of income. Their first film, "La sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon", featured the workers from their fathers' factory leaving the building. People would pay money to watch themselves leave the factory, and the Lumière brothers continued to screen short films the had shot.

In one of the Lumières' screenings, Georges Méliès was present in the audience, and as an illusionist and magician, he was intrigued by the uprising phenomenon of film making. Méliès approached the 

Lumière brothers and asked them to sell their invention, the Cinematographe, but the Lumières saw him as a potential competition and refused.Méliès having been a previous mechanic, bought an English device instead, the Animatorgraph, he simply reversed the mechanics and created his own camera.

In the Fall of 1896, Méliès was shooting a bus coming out of a tunnel when his camera jammed in the middle of the take, when he got the camera working again, the bus was replaced by a hearse.
Later when Méliès developed the film, he saw that the bus had disappeared and been replaced by the hearse on screen, which we now know as a jump cut, he put this technique into his later works, and used it to have people disappear on screen and reappear.

These were the happenings which later developed into having to cut film, as more than just one take were being taken. One of the first films to have more than one take was "Come Along, Do!" by Robert W. Paul.

The first majorly successful film to tell a story and use more than just one take was "A Trip To The Moon" by Georges Méliès in 1902. The way the shots were cut and edited was by physically cutting and pasting the footage together, using a splicer and threading the film on an editing machine.

The first editing machine to be used in the industry is the Moviola, which was invented by Iwan Serrurier. 

Around 1931 a new device was invented and introduced, the Steenbeck, which is a flatbed type of editing machine.As sound started to develop and being introduce into films, they too had to be edited into the final cut. A picynsch would be the responsible machine for finalising the soundtrack on 16mm film.
For a long time the way films were edited remained the same, physical cutting and pasting of footage.
However, as technology was advancing, new inventions were being made and one of them included the CMX-600, which is the first non-linear video editing system. The system was introduced in 1971 by CMX Systems and it had a console with two black and white monitors built in, as well as a light pen used to control the system.

For over a decade the CMX-600 was the only non-linear editing system, but in 1984 the EditDroid had its debut and was introduced as a less successful concurrent to the CMX-600.

As time was passing and computers where being invented, Quantel developed an effects composing and non-linear editing system. It was released in 1985 and was designed to render special effects in non-real time. The "Harry" was very advanced for its time and was the only machine like it for quite some time.

In 1989, a ground breaking way of editing had been released, the Avid/1. This was the first digital editing software, and it would go on to replace Moviolas and Steenbecks. It allowed editors to handle their film creations with greater ease. By 1995 dozens of production companies had switched to Avid/1, which was symbolizing the end of physical cutting of film. 

As digital editing was developing so were the home computers which people had access to. Eventually home computers were good enough to be able to run editing software, and in 1999 Apple released Final Cut Pro. This software was the best on the market and gave major concurrency to Adobe on Macs.

In 2001, the studio motion picture "The Rules of Attraction" was edited on a beta version of Final Cut Pro 3, which proved to the film industry that 3:2 pulldown matchback to 24fps could be achieved with a consumer off-the-shelf product.

It wasn't until late 2007 that Apple had competition, as that was when Adobe released Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, which was a much better, cleaner and professional working than its previous Adobe Premiere ancestors, and these two softwares have primarily hung on to being the most used film editing softwares around the world.

The Purpose of Editing

Editing helps to determine primarily four dimensions of film narrative:

• In what order the audience receive the information of a plot
• How much information the audience receive about the narrative
• How the audience is supposed to feel about events or characters at any given moment
• How the audience is supposed to experience the pace of the narrative

Creating pace in an edit consists of choosing the duration of each shot, the longer the duration of each shot the slower the pace of that scene will be. Editors can use the control of pacing to manipulate the audiences attention level depending on the feel of a scene. 

This scene from Psycho starts of relatively slow, giving a sense of security and warmth. However, as soon as the murder begins, the cuts are very quick, which speed up the pace and makes the scene feel much more uplifting and exciting than previously. It also creates the feel of hesitation and engages the audience in this way.

Fast pacing is a very common feature in action movies, and this scene in Bad Boys 2 uses it very cleverly.
It uses the usual fast cuts to set pacing, but also has a very unique shot where the camera rotates through the two rooms showcasing what is happening in the scene from every possible angle, and the way this method sets the pace is by the speed of which the camera is moving, which is fast in this case. This way, the audience feels very claustrophobic and engaged in the scene and as there is constantly a different perspective of the room.

Conventions of Editing

Continuity Editing, is the predominant style of film and video editing. The purpose of continuity editing is to create a smooth and logical transition of time and space.

To preserve a continuity edit it is important to avoid an ellipsis. The two main factors to look out for to avoid an ellipsis are "diegetic sound" and "match on action".

It is extremely important to have matching sound from one shot to the next, this also helps to smooth cuts and prevent temporal discontinuity which the audience may experience.
The same concept applies to "match on action", as it would create temporal discontinuity and distract the audience if they pick up on something which is "sloppily" edited.

Jumps Cuts, gives the effect of jumping forwards in time. It is a manipulation of temporal space and fractures the duration to move the audience ahead in the film. 

This is one of the most famous jump cuts ever made. Jump cuts are intended to jump time and violate the concept of a continuity edit, but Stanley Kubrick jumped approximately four million years in this jump shot. This effect greatly demonstrates how the first tool/weapon lead up to having man in space, and the toss of the bone was also metaphoric for a lift-off from Earth toward the Moon, with tremendous technological advances that occurred in the interim. 

180 Degree Rule, is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between two or more characters or object within a scene. This rule is most commonly used in a dialogue scene between two characters, and by staying on one side and not crossing the line, it doesn't cause confusion in the audience.

The purpose of this is to create an imaginary line on which the audience can orient themselves with the position and action of the scene.

The rule does not have to be followed, and is often purposely broken to create disorientation, a good example of this would the bathroom scene in "The Shining". The scene later on leads on to disorienting information about the story, and the setting of the scene itself also isn't clear, so crossing the line was a very clever decision by Stanley Kubrick.

Dissolves, is a gradual transition from one clip to another. The terms "Fade-in" and "Fade-out" are used to describe the transition from or to another clip.

Although dissolves tend to be around one/two seconds, the length of the dissolve depends on the desired pacing of the scene.

Dissolves are nowadays more common in classic cinema, and are being used less due to the absence of linear narrative becoming more common. 

Using the famous shower scene again from Psycho, at the end of the murder, the dissolved from Janet Leigh's blood running down the shower to an extreme close up to her dead unblinking eye, sets up a conceptual association between two things that were just similar a few moments ago, but have just become  much more closely related. It's a metaphor for how her life has literally just gone down the drain and how her eyes have become as empty as the black hole. The dissolve creates a chilling transition from life to death.

Shot-Reverse-Shot, is when a character is shows looking at another character, and then the other character is shown looking back at the first character. This technique is primarily used for dialogue scenes as the editor can show the reaction of one characters to what has been said.

It closely matches and links with the 180 degree rule.

This is a good example of a shot-reverse-shot exchange during a dialogue scene.

Cutting to a sound track, is most commonly used in action films as this technique generally creates a fast pace, but depending on the soundtrack it can also be used to make the pace slow.

This is used primarily to create a link between the scene and the soundtrack for the given scene, this can help the audience guess what is about to happen next. However, this can be manipulated and complete do the opposite of what would be expected to create a sudden shock and distortion to the viewer.

It is also a style which some editors have, and will apply to their works if appropriate, so sometimes it might not have a further meaning than just the style of the editor.