by Steven J. Cohen, Publisher

More than a decade into the digital revolution, collaborative strategies for post production are still in their infancy. OMF has mostly failed as a catalyst for the interconnected editorial workplace. A typical cutting room still doesn’t have enough equipment to keep everyone fully productive; editors still have to cajole producers into providing two Avids; we can’t share media or sequences without error-prone conversions.

What would an interconnected editorial environment look like? First, we’d see appropriate technology in the hands of everyone, from apprentice to editor, from sound assistant to mixer. Second, all systems could play and manipulate sequences and media created by the others. Many people now hope that AAF, the successor to OMF, will provide this kind of benefit. QuickTime already offers the advantages of easy media interchange, and though it differs from AAF, anyone using Final Cut can attest to how helpful this kind of compatibility can be.

After a decade of working in isolated islands, file and media compatibility will seem like a revolution for sound and picture professionals. But if we really want to work together and leverage the effort each team member contributes to a project, we’re going to need more than new file formats — we’ll need new software features.

Our editing systems are non-linear but they were primarily designed for a linear workflow. Materials were envisioned to go in one direction only: from picture editing to sound editing to mixing, or from picture editing to visual effects to online or negative cutting. But in the real world of feature films and long-form TV, temp effects, temp mixes and previews mean that materials must move in two directions — forward from picture to sound, visual effects and online, and then back to picture as the show evolves. This crucial bi-directionality takes place today only through a series of workarounds and kludges. Editors digitize entire temp mixes or onlines in order to make them available in their picture systems. Picture systems quickly run out of tracks, and material doubles up and must be carefully muted to avoid problems. Changes that should be trivial become exercises in frustration.

If we’re going to hand our work back and forth, without redigitizing and without conversion, then we’re going to need several things. First, we’ll need the ability to hide detail. No picture editor wants to manage dozens of sound effects tracks, so it should be possible to nest those tracks and cut them as a single unit. When a crossfade doesn’t work, or an effect is too loud, the track can be expanded and adjusted. We’ll also need to be able to lock tracks, clips and sequences, so that the sound department can’t accidentally cut picture and the picture department can’t accidentally delete effects or tracks.

Second, we’ll need much more robust tools to track changes. I helped Avid introduce paper change lists in the early ’90s and they seemed little short of miraculous when they first appeared. But today, those lists seem limited and buggy, and the need to communicate changes on paper seems quaint and antiquated. We need software that will clearly show all team members what changes have been made and then intelligently update one version to match another.

In this environment, all the people who need to collaborate on a project — editors, sound editors, mixers, effects artists, colorists — might work on a single master sequence that was served to them over a network. Or they could split off their own version of a sequence and work on it separately, automatically merging their work back into the master sequence when appropriate.

So far, no editing equipment manufacturer has gotten close to this ideal. We’ve waited a decade for fundamental change in the way we work together. Let us hope that as we begin to see applications share standard file formats, we’ll also see manufacturers envision the software tools to usher in a new era of creative collaboration.