Collected Data
Watch: "How Star Wars was saved in the edit"
Two points that I think are worth adding; ALL Rough Cuts suck and EVERY film is saved in edit.
Watch: "Use A Game Controller As An Editing Surface! - Adobe Premiere Tutorial"
"You can argue that for fast-cut scenes it’s better to adopt a brute-force simplicity of composition, favoring the center."
Mad Max: Fury Road seems to me a superbly directed film in its chosen style, but we can find alternatives. What about fast cutting that tries, as a part of an action scene’s kinetic drive, to shuttle or bounce the viewer’s attention more widely across the frame? This option wouldn’t be helter-skelter in the Bay manner; it’s calculated, and engenders its own pictorial excitement.
Off-center: MAD MAX’s headroom
"You know, I guess I'm kind of attracted to weird tone projects. I'm sort of a real cult movie guy."
“Well, I think that the challenge with the Deadpool character — editing-wise and I think filmmaking-wise — is his greatest asset and also his greatest challenge. It is the sort of irreverent sense of humor and the meta thing, which is the thing that we love and the fans love, but it completely subverts dramatic tension, momentum, all these sorts of things that you need to kind of engage the audience in the movie. If you're making a 20-minute cartoon, you can maybe just have like joke-meta-joke-meta-joke-meta, and then kind of [say] "The End," and have people like it. But if you're going to do a two-hour movie, you somehow need to have a story, and emotional engagement, while constantly kind of digressing and subverting and have these two things be harmonious.”
This film editor kept Deadpool from flying off the rails
"We demonstrate that our method can synthesize visually believable performances with applications in emotion transition, performance correction, and timing control."
From Disney Research;
We present a method to continuously blend between multiple facial performances of an actor, which can contain different facial expressions or emotional states…a seamless facial blending approach that provides the director full control to interpolate timing, facial expression, and local appearance, in order to generate novel performances after filming.
FaceDirector: Continuous Control of Facial Performance in Video
"Films are very good at stirring up emotion but you have to be careful about which emotion you’re stirring up."
Inevitably, there is a coarsening of the message there because of trying to adapt to all these different sensibilities and different ways of thinking on the different continents of the globe. But very often it’s simply lazy filmmaking. It’s hard to make it the other way because of the uncertainty of it all, because it’s risky. I find it much more interesting to make things this way precisely because it does involve the audience in the film. And really the last creative act of any film is viewing by the audience. The audience are really the ones who are creating the film, it doesn’t really exist on the screen, it exists in a kind of penumbra between the audience and the screen, the interaction of those two things. And exactly what you’re saying allows that interaction to take place. Otherwise, the audience is just blasted by the things coming from the screen, and they just have to sit there and take it.
‘WATCHING FEATURE MOTION PICTURES IN THEATERS IS BARELY A HUNDRED YEARS OLD, AND I’VE BEEN WORKING IN FILMS FOR HALF THAT TIME’
Watch: "In the Cut Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco"
Jim Emerson;
Wrapping up the series with looks at William Friedkin's "The French Connection" (1971), Peter Yates' "Bullitt" (1968) and Don Siegel's "The Lineup" (1958).
Watch: "In the Cut, Part I: Shots in the Dark (Knight)"
A great video essay by Jim Emerson.
A (very) detailed look at the first part of a famous TDK car/truck chase sequence, analyzing how it is put together and whether the filmmaking grammar makes sense.
You can read a transcript here.
Watch: "Chaos Cinema Parts 1 - 3" by Matthias Stork
The video essay Chaos Cinema, administered by Indiewire's journalistic blog PRESS PLAY, examines the extreme aesthetic principles of 21st century action films. These films operate on techniques that, while derived from classical cinema, threaten to shatter the established continuity formula. Chaos reigns in image and sound.
“Now, as you know, you could not take the camera and just show a nude woman being stabbed to death. It had to be done impressionistically."
"When a good commercial film manages to make its cuts invisible, it distills 100 years of lore into its editing practice."
What is going on here? Consider that our visual systems evolved over hundreds of millions of years, while film editing has been around only for a little more than 100 years. Despite this, new audiences appear to be able to assimilate splices on more or less the first try. I think the explanation is that, although we don’t think of our visual experience as being chopped up like a Paul Greengrass fight sequence, actually it is.
Strange Continuity
Watch: "The Bad Sleep Well (1960) - The Geometry of a Scene" by Tony Zhou
Editing: "QUICK AND EASY DIALOGUE CLEANUP WITH RTAS"
I didn’t really know what RTAS was useful for, much less how awesome it really is. It allows you to use many of the AudioSuite plugins that you would normally apply to a clip, and apply them to an entire track instead, without rendering (thus the RT in Real-Time Audio Suite). Up to five RTAS plugins can be chained together per track. When applied to dialogue tracks, you can chain together 3 RTAS plugins that will make your dialogue much more understandable and leave more room in other frequencies for your sound effects and music.
QUICK AND EASY DIALOGUE CLEANUP WITH RTAS
"Keywords are for organizational purposes. Descriptions are for describing. Both are useful"
At the current stage of technology development, we are largely limited to adding Content Metadata manually. If we want people described; if we want the scene described; or the action described, we need to add Keywords or Notes to achieve that. I don’t expect that to be the case in the future.
Advances in Content Recognition
Read: "Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film" by David Borwell
Today, most films are cut more rapidly than at any other time in U.S. studio filmmaking. Indeed, editing rates may soon hit a wall; it's hard to imagine a feature- length narrative movie averaging less than 1.5 seconds per shot.
(PDF) Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film
"There is a small, but significant, group of people who worry that support for the current codecs may go away in the future."
I have more concerns for the long term with an open source project. History shows that many projects start strong, but ultimately it comes down to a small group of people (or one in MOX’s case) doing all the work, and inevitably life’s circumstances intervene.
MOX: Do we need an open source codec?
"We need to change the question from: “What’s the best?” to “What do I need to meet my needs?”
We need to change the discussion from “I want it to do everything,” to “I need a system that handles my current editing with room to grow in the future.” This means that we need to take a hard look at the kind of editing we are doing and what we plan to do for the future.
Configure Your System
Larry Jordan’s blog is essential reading. This is a great post about setting up an edit system.
I’ve been asked this sort of thing in the past about editing system, cameras, lighting, etc. My answer is always the same; use the best tools you can afford, BUT do NOT rely on those tools for success. Rely on your creativity and your story.
"Many people said we were mad and that what we were trying to do couldn't be done. We proved them all wrong."
"It’s unreasonable to expect that there will be no teething problems with using a new editing system but I was rather fortunate to miss the most difficult period of the first three days as I was on the road with the crew for the three Stages that wound their way down from Yorkshire to London. Notwithstanding the fact that I had watched three seamless highlights shows on each of those evenings, I was expecting to arrive at Ealing Studios and feel like one of those new Marines marching in to find a lot of bloodied combat veterans with thousand yard stares.At the end of my first day in the edit I was only half joking when I said “ I don’t know what all the fuss was about. Piece of cake”.
Editing the Tour de France on Final Cut Pro X
Read: "The Art of Film Editing" P.O.V. Issue 6
the splice, in cinema, has more dialectical properties. It serves not merely as a pause or cæsura - something that separates or provides a brief breathing space - but on the contrary something that joins: "syntactic" in the root sense of the word. And if we are talking about magic, the magic of cinema is surely sensed to lie here: in the strange alchemy arising out of the juxtaposition of images
Taken from Issue 6 of P.O.V., dedicated to the subject of Editing.
"It’s interesting to see that in spite of a lot of press, the Avid Everywhere concept still results in confusion."
This vision positions Avid’s products as a “platform”, in the same way that Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Apple hardware and PC hardware are all platforms. Within this platform concept, the products become stratified into product tiers or “suites”. Bear in mind that “suite” really refers to a group of products and not specifically a collection of hardware or software that you purchase as a single unit. The base layer of this platform contains the various software hooks that tie the products together – for example, APIs required to use Media Composer software with Interplay asset management or in an ISIS SAN environment. This is called the Avid MediaCentral Platform.
Avid Everywhere
“It’s interesting to see...” No, it’s not. It’s obvious.
The idea is contrived and complicated, just like the software the company releases. Avid can barely manage to write functional software, the idea of them creating a “platform” is hilarious.
“People stayed on the job yesterday out of respect for the long relationship with the show, but respect has to go both ways,”
"Our automated editing method uses this as a signal indicating what action is most significant at any given time."
"The resulting videos might not have the same narrative or technical complexity that a human editor could achieve, but they capture the essential action and, in our experiments, were often similar in spirit to those produced by professionals," said Ariel Shamir, an associate professor of computer science at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel, and a member of the Disney Research Pittsburgh team.
New method automatically edits footage from cameras into coherent videos
via Fast Company
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