The Development of Editing Technology

The purpose of editing a film is to piece together a sequence of clips to create a film that makes sense and also has an impact on the viewers emotions. The idea of editing is to determine in what order the information is to be received, how the audience is meant to feel about the events and the characters, the pace of the narrative etc.

To begin with, all editing was done in-camera. Each clip was shot in chronological order, therefore one reel of film was played at a time. One of the earliest known edited films was 'The Great Train Robbery' which was written and produced by Edwin S Porter. The film was only 12 minutes in length but includes a wide variety of editing techniques such as jump cuts and cross-cutting. 

Moviola

The earliest forms of editing were very basic. Laboratory processing of the exposed film negatives was required and then if a film editor wanted to cut a scene, they would have to cut the reel of film over a well of light. This method had to be repeated several times and was very time-consuming. However, in 1924, the moviola was introduce by a man named Iwan Serruier. It was a device that allowed a film editor to view a film whilst editing it simultaneously. 

Film editors could study individual shots in the cutting room so that they could pin-point an appropriate point to cut. The moviola was a vertically-orientated machine where the work prints and magnetic sound tapes were run in a similar way to the thread in a sewing machine. At one point in the process, each frame on the print would pass through a lens and the image would get viewed on the machine's viewing screen. A special chalk-like pen could then be used on each frame to mark on what the editor intended to do - whether he wanted to cut or splice the frame.

The Moviola was adopted by many huge names in the film industry, such as Universal Studios, Warner Brothers and Charles Chaplain Studios. Even today, famous director Stephen Spielberg instructed that the film editor he employed for his film Munich, Michael Kahn, use the moviola machine to edit.

Flatbed Edit Suite
A Flatbed Edit suite is type of editing machine used with motion picture. Images and sound rolls are loaded onto separate plates. Each set of plates moves individually, or they can be locked together to maintain synchronisation between the images and the sound. A prism reflects the images onto a screen, and a magnetic playback head reads the audio tracks. The most common flatbed editors are the six-plate which has one picture transport, two sound transports, and the eight-plate, which has two picture and two sound transports. Most films are shot on a double-system, which is where the sound and picture are recorded on separate machines. The sound is then transferred to a magnetic track (filmstock coated with magnetic oxide). The editor must then synchronize the picture and sound. The rolls are loaded onto the plates and the film and sound is advanced to find when the clapperboard came together. Once both have been located, a mark is made on both of the strips and the flatbed is switched into interlock mode, so both picture and sound rolls move at the same pace to keep them synchronized. When the editor sees a point to cut one shot away to another, he marks is on both strips and makes a cut in both and adds in the next shot. Steenbeck and K-E-M (Keller-Elektro-Mechanik) are the two most common brands of flatbed editors, and both invented in Germany in the 1930s.
  

Linear and Non-Linear Editing
Linear editing is a post-production process of selecting, arranging and modifying images and sound in a predetermined sequence, (also known as tape-to-tape) it was the only way to edit video tapes to begin with and was used a lot in live TV. In the 1990s, Non-Linear editing (NLE) computers became available and gave a new way of editing. This allowed the original content to not be modified, but the edits themselves are edited by editing software. Each time the audio, video or image is rendered or played back it is copied from the original and editing steps, keeping the original copy safe.

References

• Timrohamro.com,. "Moviola: The First Movie Editing Machine". N.p., 2016. Web. 6 Jan. 2016.
•  Itchyfish.com,. "Old School Film Editing Machines: Moviola And Steenbeck - Itchy Fish". N.p., 2010. Web. 6 Jan. 2016.