Video editing has come a long way since its humble beginnings in the analog world. Editors who made the transition to digital editing share their wisdom, tips, and tricks for mastering digital video editing.
Most people would say that it all started with film, where editors worked in a smoke-filled cutting room cutting and slicing bits of celluloid and making decisions on the fly with only a stopwatch and a measuring device to help them. With film, every edit was cut into the negative, which made changes even more difficult. That’s where the word ‘cut’ originated. Great editors like D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein began to exploit the power of montage as a tool of editing. Editing on television and video was also a linear affair and was often completed on a videotape, which meant many copies of the same video over and over again, which, like film, could be a destructive editing process.
When computers entered the scene in the late 1990s, digital editing changed the game by introducing non-destructive editing, where clips could be played around with on the computer without any changes made to the master. Now, everyone could use Avid and Adobe Premiere, add effects, transitions, and layers, once reserved for professionals with deep pockets. This has greatly increased efficiency, for now editors can view their changes in real-time and easily return to a previous version of the edit. It also introduced special effects that now allow for a blend of fantasy and reality, as we see in many popular action and adventure movies that have special effects. But it also has its downside, with an excess of options that can take away from the real job of an editor: cutting, tone, and rhythm.
Fast forward to the 21st century and the development of cloud based editing tools and collaboration allow editors from around the world to work together, live. Much like the way content is used today. It’s no longer just about entertainment, it’s about education, advertising, and social justice. With the advent of metadata and automated media management, editors can now spend less time worrying about logistics and more time developing their ideas. Mobile editing apps are becoming increasingly popular and have opened the door to a whole new generation of editors, and anyone can now literally edit anywhere they go. The smartphone has become a post-production facility in the palm of your hands. It doesn’t matter which tool you use, what’s important is that you understand the basics of how to tell a story. Technology is only an enabler for editors, and will never replace the creativity and skill of a well-crafted edit.
In the future, we can expect video editing to continue to incorporate other emerging technologies like virtual reality, AI enhancements and more, with a focus on immersing our other senses into a project. Editors will need to learn how to work with these new tools without compromising the core elements of the story. As the landscape of video editing continues to change, its core purpose will remain the same — to engage the viewer on a personal level through the combination of images and sound. As video editing continues to evolve, it also challenges us to see where we can go with the craft, combining the old with the new.
Viewed in retrospect, this development makes video editing similar to any other technology and thus to society itself; once strictly mechanical, video editing has become successively digital, soft, and social. Each phase of video editing adds to and develops that of the previous one. The value is in the intellectual and creative contribution of the editor to the project and its final product, just as the project brings value to the society in which it is received. New editors should not be afraid to adapt as the video editing process continues to evolve.