Reddit reviews Technique of Film Editing, Reissue of 2nd Edition

I think you can track down older books, like this one, which cover it, but since you listed out all those questions, I'll throw out some answers.

As context, I was trained in analog, but then did just a very small amount of professional assistant work that way before switching over fully to digital. No direct experience on major Hollywood films, but I knew people who worked on a few.

> Were editors editing the master copy of a film or would a bunch of temporary copies made and then those were edited?

Editing was done with a 'work print', a low quality print of the negative. You could get 2-3 of these made, but there usually wasn't need for a bunch.

> Once the edit is locked, is it the copy from the editor's bay that's copied to distribution or is the edit reapplied to a cleaner copy? Is the master stock ever cut (like, with a blade)?

The negative is cut to match the locked work print. Yes, it's cut with a blade. In some cases, it was cut in a way that would irreversibly destroy the adjacent unused frames.

> If I'm seeing a film in a movie theatre, how many generations removed is that film from inside of the canister when shooting?

Typically, the original negative is used to create a few 'inter-positive' prints, then those are used to make several 'inter-negative' prints, and then the theatrical positive was produced from those. So 3 generations! But the generational loss was not as bad as you might think.

> How are different takes organized within the editing bay?

Typically, the first step is to pick 'selects': just the 1-3 takes you think are good. You could have more, but usually it's a small percentage of the takes that were done. The bad takes get put away in can on a shelf.

The selects for a scene then get strung up on a film editing bin, basically just a metal bar with clips, over basically a big box/can lined with fabric, to prevent the film from picking dust from the floor.

> If I want to try a different take to see if it works better, what's the process like to accomplish this?

Cut out the bad take, tape in the good one. These little splicing tools make it pretty fast.

> In digital, I'm often obsessing over the exact frame to cut on and I go back and forth over several options. What was that process like with film? If I decide a cut and later on decide that scene needs 2 more frames, is that going to be a massive pain in the ass?

In those days, editors would develop the ability to kind of cut in their head. You figure out which frame is going to be the last one, and then you cut. After a while, you often get it right on the first try. It's very easy to trim again, if you need to. And if you immediately change your mind and want to add in a couple more frames, just keep them close by and tape them back in, no problem.

On the other hand, let's say you cut a scene weeks ago, and now you suddenly decide you want it to play out slower. Tracking down the 'tails' of shots in this case can be a pain; call for the assistant.

> With digital, nothing is ever lost. If I want to go back to a previous edit of a film, it's stored on my hard drive. But film is edited destructively so what systems were in place for recording edits? If a director tells me that he changed his mind and he prefers the way I edited the scene last week, am I SOL?

This is one of the biggest advantage of digital. You could make a dupe, but this wasn't common. The main technique is to just have a notebook and write down what you changed.

> With digital, I can screen a cut of a movie to an audience, take feedback and suggestions and then go back and recut in a matter of hours or days and iteratively work on it. Was this possible/easy when editing film?

Sure, quite easy. The actual editing process itself wasn't so much slower, not counting effects and such.

But... with analog, it was a little less tempting to make last-minute changes, because you wouldn't want to break down the film and risk actually having the cut be in literal pieces when it's supposed to play. I say only a little, because I can attest to filmmakers who were absolutely making edits, at major film festivals, to later reels while earlier reels were being projected.

> How does sound work? Is sound another physical strip that I have to keep in sync with the video strip? How does all of that get managed?

Yes, when editing you have a work-print and separate magnetic tape. Your selected take is the two together.

Going back to that picture of the flatbed, you can see multiple 'plates' on each side of the desk; in this case there are 2 for picture and 2 for sound. The editing system generally plays them both together, so it keeps it all in sync for you, by default.

Getting out of sync did happen sometimes, even with experience. So before editing, you usually write a bunch of film edge numbers onto the magnetic tape with a sharpie or whatever. If they get separated or out of sync, it's usually pretty easy to correct.

> Does anyone still edit the manual way today?

Some hipsters. A few artists.

> Do we know when the last mainstream movie that was edited completely on film was?

I think it's yet to be made. Last sorta' mainstream movie I heard about is 2014's Jimmy's Hall. Fun article.

> How quick was the transition from film to digital?

This timeline seems about right. About 5 years from "very rare to edit digitally" (1993) to "most everone's doing it, even curmudgeons like Woody Allen" (1998) followed by another 10 years where you'd still regularly see an indie or foreign film. Quite rare after 2008.

> What did the introduction of digital editing make much easier and how has that changed the process for editing movies? What kinds of movies do we see today that we rarely saw when editing was still analog? What kinds of editing do we see more of/less of?

Films with a lot of dense layering, dissolves, overlays and tons of quick cuts were truly difficult. Vertov, Eisenstein, and Kinugasa did it in the silent era, but it didn't come back into vogue until the 90s with digital, around the time of Natural Born Killers, then a bunch of Tony Scott & Bruckheimer films. And in more recent years you have 'fast-cutters' like Guy Maddin, whose recent films would be very difficult in analog.

Other ideas:

• Effects-driven films are better on digital too, because you can easily cut in (or even manipulate) kinematics or whatever as part of the editing process.
  
• Integrating sound design into the overall editing process used to be tough; sound was usually an afterthought. It still often is, but digital makes it way easier to do really creative sound design and integrate that into the whole process.In my view, not too many filmmakers really do this. Tykwer, Zemeckis, a few others.
  
• Finally, intra-shot editing—picking a different take for the left side of the shot than the right side—is getting big. But this may be more of a newer development, not part of the '90s revolution you're interested in.
  
  But to be clear, the conventional wisdom is that if you're making a standard 'continuity' dramatic film, the editing tech doesn't change things much. Digital's cheaper, more convenient, maybe a little faster. But a lot of films would probably end up very similar in either process.

Sidney Lumet's book, Making Movies, covers most of the spectrum and is simply a great read.

As for other books, they are generally more technical. For screenwriting, there's McKee's Story; for editing, there's Reisz and Millar's Technique of Film Editing; for cinematography, there's Blain Brown's Cinematography Theory and Practice. And Lumet's book would complete this tetralogy, being a book essentially about directing.