PICTURE EDITING IN THE 21st CENTURY Should I Be Worried About That Kid With The iMac DV? by Larry Jordan The dawn of a new era is upon us, the technology we use to complete the task we traditionally call "filmmaking" continues to evolve at blinding speeds, and almost daily its impact on professional editors grows. By now it's old news that the Avid has all but replaced film in the cutting room. And when was the last time you spoke to a sound editor who still cuts on mag? Many editors, sound and picture alike, scoffed at the new ways of working when they became available early in this decade. Some said they weren't interested in learning digital editing at all. From what I've seen, 99.5% of this latter group either changed their minds or ceased to work in our industry. Avid has announced that sometime next summer its new "Millennium Edition" will be offering film capabilities on the sporty new G4 PowerMacs. You've seen the groovy new design and hip looking Lucite case. I find it funny that we have come to take these tools for granted: personal computers so powerful that the US government prohibits their manufacturer (Apple) from exporting them to certain countries for fear of what those unfriendly governments might cook up on them. Kind of frightening, huh? This new Avid promises dual streams of uncompressed, broadcast quality video and will eventually handle high-definition video. Don't be surprised if producers start asking if we could "online a quick promo reel" for Show West, AFM, MIFED or Cannes. After that we might be on-lining the whole film for a preview via digital projection. Maybe we would even bring an Avid along to make changes between the 5 and 7:00 p.m. screenings. Seems like a no brainer right? The studios outfit 5 or 10 of their favorite preview theaters with digital projection technology, and the process of conforming work picture will be all but a distant memory. On the other side of the synchronizer, have you been on a dubbing stage lately? I consider myself pretty technologically savvy--I'm always ready to give the latest gizmo a try--so I was surprised when I recently walked into the machine room of Stage A at Disney and suddenly felt an eerie sense of time displacement. No more mag dummies--with the exception of the master recorders, they were bare. But to my right stood a wall of new, digital dubbers, TASCAM MMR-8s and MMR-16s. The rapidly blinking green and red lights of the MMRs really made the empty, dust collecting magna-techs look lonely. As much as I love new technology, (and the MMRs are quite awesome) seeing the silent old machines, which for half a century served editors and mixers so well, made me nostalgic and a little sad. Nowadays, sound editors simply pull hard drives out of their Pro Tools workstations and hand them to recordists who slide the brick sized modules into the MMRs which read the edited sessions directly off the drive. Time marches on. By now many of you have also heard of, and maybe even played around with, some amazing new technologies from the likes of Sony and Apple. The first is DV, an acronym for Digital Video--the compact, Betacam-quality videotape format developed by a consortium of electronics manufacturers and championed by Sony. Second is DV's sister technology, FireWire, or as it is known by its utterly geeky name, IEEE-1394--a data transfer protocol developed by Apple. Among other things, FireWire allows huge streams of data to be moved across relatively small cables at blistering speeds. When you combine these two nifty technologies with the power of the G3s and G4s, you effectively eliminate the need for hardware compression cards, such as those used to digitize video into an Avid. Because of their affordability and ease of use, DV and FireWire technologies are contributing to the greatest democratization of dynamic media creation (motion pictures, television, documentaries, music videos, you name it) in the history of the moving image. And as they grow in prevalence, these technologies are shaking the foundations of the filmmaking process, just as the Avid did at its introduction. Recent articles in the Los Angeles and New York Times make allusions to the fact that these affordable new tools have the potential to threaten the dominance of the major motion picture studios. Wired Magazine, the bible of the digital generation, even ran a cover story entitled "Life After Hollywood" which focused on the power, reach and potential of FireWire and DV. It cited the success of "The Blair Witch Project," and the decision of several more established filmmakers to utilize the new technologies. Whether the studios will fall remains to be seen. However, most observers agree that more people than ever before will have the chance to tell their stories to a mass audience. As many of us know, for a film to get wide exposure it really needs only two things, 1, a good story, and 2, that the story be told in a halfway competent cinematic manner. Sometimes you don't even need 2 if 1 is exceptionally powerful. Which brings me to the subtitle of this article: should I be worried about that kid with the iMac DV?. As reflected by its skyrocketing stock price, Apple is selling iMacs, their candy-colored powerful little reinvention of the computer, like hotcakes. They can't ship them to dealers fast enough. Maybe you've bought one for yourself or your son or daughter. Most recently Apple has released a "DV" edition of this machine. Not only does this model, (like its more expensive siblings the G3s and G4s) have FireWire built in, it comes with a free version of Apple's new iMovie editing software. Yes, you read it correctly, with every one of these computers Apple gives away free editing software. Apple's visionary CEO and founder Steve Jobs has said that desktop video will be to the next decade what desktop publishing was to the 1980's. Of course, the desktop publishing revolution of the 80's produced a tremendous amount of horrendous graphic design, and we all know that owning the latest copy of Microsoft Word or Final Draft won't turn you into William Goldman or Nora Ephron. But the cold, hard reality is that in the very near future the number of people practicing the editing craft will, very likely, explode. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming for a moment that Apple's iMovie software will replace our Avids. It won't any time soon. However, it won't be long before everyone who has the wherewithal to buy a computer will be able to have a semi-broadcast quality, digital editing system in their home, even on their laptop. Apple has proved they are serious about being in the dynamic media creation business. If iMac DV and iMovie are a way to whet people's appetites, their new "higher-end" editing and compositing application, Final Cut Pro is a way to get them hooked. Although not yet a major competitor with Avid in Hollywood, (it currently does not have the ability to do 24fps), Final Cut Pro is giving Avid a serious run for their money in all but the motion picture, television and digital on-line finishing markets. And there are a slew of independent filmmakers latching on to this product as a cost-effective alternative to the long-term rental of a Film or Media Composer. How will this affect us as editors and as a Guild? What will you do when the director or producer or their assistant or husband or wife comes into the cutting room and runs a freshly cut version of a scene (that they just had a couple of problems with) on their ultra-spiffy and super-fast PowerBook G3? Worst of all, what happens if the damn thing is pretty good? Or heaven forbid, REALLY good! Some of us will throw up our hands and say "I quit" and some will throw the bastards out of our cutting rooms threatening to erase the hard drives. Others will have the ability to work within this new context. What is important is that if we are interested in continuing to practice our craft into the 21st Century, we will have to come up with solutions to these questions both individually and collectively as a Guild. As always, some projects will be more difficult than others. As professionals we understand that this is the nature of our work. And sometimes during even the most difficult experiences we are rewarded with a product we can be proud of. Most important, we can take solace in the simple truth that no matter what changes may come our way, it is the skill of the editor that is critical. No technology can ever change that. Here's hoping that we all get to collaborate with directors and producers who understand, respect and appreciate this simple fact. And be nice to that kid with the iMac DV. You never know when he or she might land that 3-picture deal.   Larry Jordan is an editor and 18-year member of the Guild whose credits include "NYPD Blue", "Fallen", "Jack Frost", and "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo". He is currently on location in Illinois editing "New Port South". He is also the creator and editor of 2-Pop - The Final Cut Pro and DV Creation Site He can be reached via email. Want to talk about this? Click here to visit our Discussion Groups   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 21, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 2000   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700