September 27, 2003
Editing
No, I don't really have anything to say. But my enthusiasm for saying nothing has been renewed. Thanks in part to my friends, in part to people here who are not exactly friends but some online thing we don't have a noun for yet (though I'd like them to become friends in time; we can live in hope), and in part (oh dear, oh dear) to Apple.Tonight (and probably for several days to come) I'm editing the footage from this year's Marching Boys outing, using the rather nifty Final Cut Express.
A long, long time ago, editing was the part of the film-making process that I got on with best. I pretty much knew that was going to be the case before I even started doing it, and when it came to it, I was more than right. Pretty much all of my best times in college were spent in the edit suites, as assistant editor on a fun graduation film from the year above me called Life Could Be A Dream, or as full-blown editor on my group's first year outing Sales Tax Cloud Hangs Over Nakasone (don't ask) and my final year co-production (with the lovely but tragically straight David Peters) The Walk.
There is an interesting (or perhaps not, but bear with me) parallel to the discussion in the comments section of my last post. Editing, you see, is a rather solitary process. It's interactive, and communicative -- it pretty much defines what you see onscreen -- and ideally you don't do it entirely alone. But still, it's a question of mind over matter, an immersive psychic wrestle in a darkened room, a very hackerish pursuit.
In the pre-digital age, I have to confess, I was not really a fan of video editing. It was clunky and baroque, and the results were frankly shameful. You knew where you stood with film. You could hold it in your hands, scrawl all over it with a chinagraph pencil, see it (with apologies to the late Stan Brakhage) with your own eyes. Film was an intensely physical medium. Video, on the other hand, was a handful of brown dust.
As is, of course, pretty much everything we do online.
The moment I really understood that the world had changed -- many years after I'd become a part of that changed world; just call me slow on the uptake -- was in 19mumblemumble, when I first used Deck II. I had no fucking idea what that program was, it came bundled with some Director upgrade I bought. (Deck no longer belongs to Macromedia. Since Macromedia are, more or less, the devil incarnate, this can only be a good thing.)
Deck, which, among other things, has built every Marching Boys soundtrack of the last 6 years, is a truly amazing program. Perfectly simple, and simply perfect. What it does is simulate a recording studio. Digitally. With as many, independently manageable, tracks as you want. It took me about 10 minutes to fall in love with it, and I still think it's a fantastic piece of work. There are a few other media editing programs that have impressed me as much -- Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut, Reason -- but Deck was the one that convinced me that analogue had had its day. (As I said, slow on the uptake.)
The foundation of an edit suite, back in the day, was a device called a pic-sync. Basically, a long cylinder with sprockets. Using sound tape with sprocket holes the same gauge as the film, it would allow you to keep one filmstrip and four soundtracks in sync as you edited them. You could wind back and forth, chopping and changing things on one side or the other, safe in the knowledge that an absolute timescale existed, embodied in those little metal sprockets.
Deck II was an audio editing app, so it lacked the video track, but in audio terms it manifested the physicality of the pic-sync exactly, but with much greater precision, and the fidelity, the reproducibility, of digital media. 10 minutes, as I say, and I was sold.
Final Cut Express (the "Pro" version is grotesquely expensive, but then how much is a pic-sync, or a Steenbeck, even now?) is not quite Deck II, but it does pretty much what a film editing suite, with pic-sync and Steenbeck, did, and a great deal more. As ever with software, some things about it are incredibly fucking irritating, but on the whole it's a bloody marvel.
And so, this weekend will probably be spent in it, trying to conjure a single ideal video depiction of two dances from umpteen performances along the course of the Pride march, and by Monday I'll probably hate Apple's guts. But in the meantime, I'm back, I'm creative, I've got my groove back.
