My grandpa is always talking about how much movies have changed with time. His favorite movie, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, is an example of how editing and special effects have changed drastically since 1982 and even before that. Watching a movie from this year compared to a movie from the 1930s, you would notice many differences. In the beginning, there was no digital technology to edit films. There have also been important contributors to help evolvement in film editing. In the process of editing film, there are some common editing techniques that have been used ever since film started. The way you edit a scene can also affect the mood and feeling of it. Although the editing of filmmaking has changed a lot over time, there are many reasons for the cause of this including humanities drastic evolvement in technology.
In the beginning, there was no digital technology to edit films. The initial editing of all films was done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film work print. This was done by physically cutting and pasting together pieces of film, using a splicer and threading the film on a machine with a viewer, which was a Moviola, "flatbed" machine or Steenbeck. The 2" Video Tape Recording System (VTR) created by Ampex Corp. was introduced in 1956. This device was also called the splicing block. The user of the machine was able to view the splice point through a microscope. The machine also had a cutting blade that was mounted across the guide to be able to make cuts. Early in the sixties, the “edit VTR” was created and this device was used for less damage from the physical handling of film. “Using a "playback" or "source" VTR, the editor was able to watch the original shots and use the other VTR to rerecord the desired shots.” In 1963, Apex developed the EDITEC system. The editor was able to control video and audio of the film. Video animation was made possible because of the use of frame-by-frame shift-editing points and an “automatic” edit. In the year of 1971, CBS and Memorex created the CMX 600. This system consisted of transferring the film on the tape onto a computer disk drive. One disk drive could only hold up to five minutes. It would take one hundred disk drives for a two-hour film. The system did well for some years but that’s when people started to notice a few problems. The device was overpriced averaging at 250,000 dollars in 1971, which would be 1.2 million dollars in modern day’s money. Throughout the 1980’s many devices were being created although they still lacked the most important aspect, which was storage. In 1989 the company Avid created a device that became the essential editing tool for Hollywood. The name of this tool was called the Avid1 and was known as a “Macintosh based nonlinear editor.” In 1999, Apple released Final Cut Pro. Professionals did not take the system seriously when it first came out. It soon evolved into a very important system used for editing. In the 1990s a system called the IEEE...
