The Editor - Does The Editor Have A Future?

So, what will we all be doing in our editing rooms as we move closer to the end of the first decade of the 21st century?

Several weeks ago I wrote a post about the future of editing called The Future Waves Hello. In it, I talked about how new technology is creating a world in which long-distance collaboration, where I can be in a different city than my director or producer, is not only possible but desirable.

Today, however, I’d like to take a more prosaic approach to the future and it’s one that I’ve discussed often on my other blog, Hollyn-wood. I’d like to directly address a common question among editors, namely — just what does the industry want us to do nowadays. And the answer is — a lot more.

The great and horrible thing about the so-called “democratization of the media“, in which the tools of production and post-production are cheap enough so almost anyone who wants to create media can, is that it puts pressure on all of us to become generalists.  This is fantastic financially if you’re an producer who doesn’t want to hire someone to color correct his or her projects. It makes sense financially if you’re an independent artist who can’t afford to hire someone to do the sound design on a film. It also makes sense financially if you’re a studio and would rather not go to an online room (at $600 an hour plus HD tape costs) to prepare a film for a one-time public preview when you can simply project directly out of your editing system with really good looking results (think Apple ProRes 422, and Avid DNX HD codecs — gobbledy-gook, gobbledy-gook).

Bringing all of those functions into the editing room makes perfect financial sense.  And that is the pressure that we’re all in today, even in high-end professional editing rooms.

The days when all we needed to know were how to shape stories and edit for performance are gone. It is my guess that on high-end projects, where the budget for an editor is not a high percentage of total costs, you can still get away with those two traits, but not easily. However, even on projects as we;;-financed as IRON MAN or BATMAN, I’d imagine, it is important that the editor know how to create visual effects within their Avid or Final Cut system — if only as a template for the VFX team to follow. As another example, it has been years since I’ve edited with only a single dialogue track. It is now important to split tracks, add music and sound effects, and create something that feels like a finished soundtrack. Even on films like the low budget documentary I’m editing now.

Part of the reason for this, if you ask me, is that the types of people who are going to be watching your film-in-progress have expanded. When I was an apprentice editor on NETWORK, we screened once or twice for the studio (MGM) with just a single dialogue track. The executives watching the film understood what it was they were watching and made mental accommodations for the lack of music, sound effects and overlapping dialogue tracks.  Today, when you’ve got bankers, agents, dentists and all manners of financiers sitting in on intermediate cuts, it’s impossible to get away with that. They just don’t have the ability to imagine what the end product is going to be like, based on a viewing of a film without temporary music and sound effects, a slick mix, snazzy looking visual effects, and a smooth shot-to-shot color balance.

“That chase scene seems boring to me” someone might say, without realizing that it’s going to feel completely different when the car sounds and music are pumping away on the soundtrack. You can explain it to them, and they will probably even understand it. But you’ve missed the chance to get their first impressions of the actual film. It is is gone forever because they needlessly felt bored while they were sitting there, watching that chase scene. They checked out of the film at that point for no reason that would affect the actual final film.  They just couldn’t make those mental accommodations.  As a filmmaker, you will have lost the opportunity to get a useful reaction to your work. And given some wrong impressions in the meantime that will probably haunt you for the length of post production.

Extrapolate that to other obvious and less obvious filmmaking “gotchas”.  Wires that were used to suspend props or people who will eventually appear to be flying, won’t be painted out in some early cuts. A distracting noise on the original production tracks will detract from a key line of dialogue. A crucial multiple split screen is missing, changing the style and story at that moment. All of these things will impact the non-savvy viewer.

It’s easy to forget that, way back in the stone age when non-linear editing began, you were lucky if you could do a dissolve. When I was editing on Lightworks I had fades and dissolves, but nothing more.  Many tape editing systems before that were called “cuts only” because, well… they couldn’t show anything except… cuts.

It’s no accident that digital editing systems like Avid, Final Cut and Premiere have become more and more feature-laden as the years have gone on. They are harder to use, but the tools are being increasingly used on a daily basis.  It is now important, even essential, for editors to be able to shape their projects using tools that include, but go beyond, character and story editing (in the old-fashioned sense).

So, what will you need to know as an editor today?  Here is the minimum skill set that will make you competitive in the job market:

• Familiarity with at least two editing systems.  I’d choose Avid and Final Cut, though some industries and many European and Middle East markets really want Adobe Premiere.
• Ability to do soundtrack manipulation.  For some people, this means a great familiarity with all of the filters and plug-ins available on your editing system. That’s crucial but an additional skill would be to know applications like Pro Tools, Soundtrack Pro, Logic or Audition.
• Ability to do basic color correction. My wife is convinced that I’m completely color blind because of the way I dress every morning. That excuse won’t save me in the editing world (remind me to tell you about a color blind director I once worked for). You need the ability to take a shot which looks too gray and touch it up so that it matches the shot immediately following which is more blue.  You can do that on a basic level within any good editing program. You can do it really well using the color correction modules in Avid and Final Cut (I don’t know about Premiere since I don’t use it). But add-on programs like Color and Looks, and to manipulate what you’ve shot to give you some very different. These programs help you get even better color correction results, though the learning curve is horrific.
• Visual Effects creation savvy. With nearly every single film and television project out there having some visual effects (even if it’s just adding a skyline to a scene which has too many buildings in it), it is important to be able to work with green screen, to create mattes, and manipulate the image in increasingly complex ways. Facility with programs like Photoshop are also a real plus.
• Along with that comes the ability to create the internal and transition effects that are on every show nowadays. Being able to create good titles in pple, Avid FX or another program, as well as to move the image in and out of split screens, is an essential skill if you want your collaborators to understand the vision for the film.
• Compression knowledge. This is actually a placeholder for all of the skills that you’ll need in order to output cuts from your system and put them on a DVD, server, or some web-based location,  for viewing by your director, producer, studio exec or your favorite dentist/financier. It is also helpful, if your film is going to end up on the web in some way (and whose film isn’t?) to be able to know the workflow that will get it there.  Familiarity with Compressor and the much better (in my mind) Sorenson Squeeze is essential for this.

That’s a pretty hefty list and, I’m sure, that you’ll be able to add some more to it (please post a comment if you do — it will help everyone, including me, to get a sense of the landscape). But each and every one of those skills on the list are good to have. It is impossible for any of us to master all of them, of course.  I certainly don’t have a clue what to do with Color, for isntance. But if you’re going up for a project with a lot of music in it, it would be good to have a music editing skill — so you can expand and contract cues in a musical way, rather than hacking a piece of music to bits. In the same way, if you’re in competition for a project that has special effects in it, it would be good to be able to manipulate the image in a good storytelling way, rather than hack that up to bits. Those skills will give your director and producer (and financiers) confidence that you can help deliver the story that they want to tell.

And with those skills, The Editor will have a future.

In a few weeks I’ll write about editing short short films for the web but until I do, it would be good to realize that a healthy familiarity with all of those forms of new distribution will make you more employable and lead to great happiness — both creatively and financially.

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