Task Three – From Analogue to Digital Editing

Analogue Editing

Analogue editing when you edit your film but cutting and gluing together pieces of celluloid film. Traditionally films are made up of images that have been printed on to acetate negatives. These are then ‘spliced’ together to form a reel of films. These are then feed through a projector at a constant speed of 24 frames a second which makes the pictures appear to be moving as there are so many of them in such a little space and every one of them is different by only a little bit to give the illusion of movement. The advantage of using analogue editing is that it will give people a sense of nostalgia, especially to the older generations as it may bring back memories of their youth. The disadvantage of this is that when it comes to editing you have to do it by hand which will take many hours and you will also need to edit it from the beginning to end, not in any order you want.

The First Moviola

Before the widespread of non-linear editing systems, the initial editing of all the films made was done with a positive copy of the film negative called a film work print (cutting copy in UK) by physically cutting and pasting together of film, using a splicer and threading the film on a machine with a viewer such as the Moviola. The advantage of using a Moviola is that people could actually see what they was editing while they was doing it, which made it easier to edit, which meant less chance of mistakes. The disadvantage of this machine is that it also needed to be edited from the beginning to end, not in any order you wanted.

Video Editing

Before digital technologies become available, magnetic tapes were used to store information – these are known as video tapes. Most video editing has been superseded by digital editing which is faster and cheaper to make than video editing.

Digital Editing

Digital media is a form of electronic media where data are stored in digital (as opposed to analogue) form. Digital editing is the use of computers to order and manipulate the digital data. Digital cinema uses bits and bytes (Strings of 1’s and 0’s) to record, transmit and relay images, instead of chemicals on film. The whole process is electronic so there in to printing or ‘splicing’ involved. The advantages of using digital editing is that you are able to edit in any order you want which was a big benefit to the editors as if they had an idea they could do it there and then in case they forgot it. Also there is no ‘splicing’ involved there is less chance of mistakes and also you are able to go back on the changes you made as you have not physically cut anything. The disadvantage of this type of method is that people might not be up-to-date with technology and not know how to edit the film, or they like the sense of nostalgia and actually prefer doing it by hand and ‘splicing’ the film to edit it, as it may give them a sense of achievement.

Non-Linear Editing

In digital video editing, non-linear editing is a method that allows you to access any frame in a digital video clips regardless of sequence in the clip. The freedom to access any frame, and use a cut-and-paste method, similar to the ease of cutting and pasting text in a word processor, and allows you to easily include fades, transitions, and other effects that cannot be achieved with linear 

editing.