There’s a very interesting interview with Walter Murch on Apple’s Web site (linked via 2Blowhards). Murch is a famous film editor who was in film school in Los Angeles with Coppola and Lucas and who has been working more recently with director Anthony Minghella. There’s also a great book of conversations between Murch and Michael Ondaatje about the art of editing.
Murch, whose credits include �Apocalypse Now� and �The English Patient,� has a history of pushing tools as vigorously as he pursues the fluid cut. Still, he turned industry heads by choosing to cut �Cold Mountain� � an $80 million picture � on Final Cut Pro and several off-the-shelf Power Mac G4s. To keep it interesting, Murch conducted his experiment halfway across the world in rural Romania, where the film was shot to capture the look and feel of 19th-century North Carolina.
Are new editors missing anything by learning on non-linear editing systems instead of older systems, or is that older editors waxing nostalgic?
I think there are only two areas where something is missing. When you actually had to make the cut physically on film, you naturally tended to think more about what you were about to do. Which � in the right proportion � is a good thing to do. The cut is a kind of sacramental moment. When I was in grade school they made us write our essays in ink for the same reason. Pencil was too easy to erase.
The other �missing� advantage to linear editing was the natural integration of repeatedly scanning through rolls of film to get to a shot you wanted. Inevitably, before you ever got there, you found something that was better than what you had in mind. With random access, you immediately get what you want. Which may not be what you need.
I was in film school in San Francisco in 1990 and at the time, digital filmmaking tools weren’t available. I had to learn to cut movies on antique looking machines such as the upright Moviola and the 6-plate Steenbeck. Ah, the magic of the light coming out of 16mm footage viewed through a Steenbeck screen! I remember how surprised I was when our teacher showed us how to make a cut. I couldn’t believe you actually had to cut the movie and splice it back with tape, repeating the same movement from the picture track to the soundtrack. How exciting it was to actually hold the movie in my hands, cut it and put it back together, while checking the cut over and over again to get it right! I had often heard people refer to movies as a craft and it’s exactly how it felt. It was like weaving or even macram� (only the results were more interesting, of course).
A couple of years after I finished the film program, the school built a new Fine Arts building with all the most recent high tech tools available for the students. I felt envious yet I was glad I got to learn film editing the old fashioned way. The « cuts » I’ve done since then, on Premiere or Avid, are just not the same thing as the splices I did in film school.
