Editing style differences between the film era and the digital domain we now have.

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

Ever get the feeling that movies these days have a totally different editorial "feel" or style, as compared to say films from the pre-1990's? I had noticed this for some time but it was only late last night as I was trying without success to get some sleep, that there is a very tangible difference in the flow and style of editing today.

To get what I am saying, let's go way back to the beginning of movies as we knew them. In the silent era, films were projected on 1,000 foot reels for roughly 10-15 minutes of run time per reel. (probably because that was the limit of endurance to hand crank a projector back then. ) So in the telling of a story back then, to help avoid a jarring transition at a reel end/reel change, editors tried to use shots that could be cut a bit short or transitioned with fades to black/ fades from black. This way, any timing errors during a changeover would be somewhat masked, as would any differences in projection light output, (and later, sound quality) etc.

Then with the advent of talkies and motorized projection, as well as better(?) writing and longer stories, projection migrated to the 2,000ft reel for projection. (Editing remained on 1,000ft reels to the end, which made things easier and less costly to change on post production.) The shift in editing followed, with the "story beats" timed to a 20 minute projection reel. (Since lab printing easily masked the mid point "A/B" splice, it was virtually never noticed on a projection reel.) Even a layperson would notice a splice at a reel change (on platter systems) with the accompanying pop or mute in sound for a split second.

In my career both as a projectionist and with seeing many films, there were very rare exceptions to this conscious (or subconscious) decision in the editing process.

One such very popular film was "Chariots Of Fire" where virtually EVERY reel change was in a critical dialog scene, and IIRC at least two were literally mid-sentence. I ran that film my very first month as a projectionist, 3 shows total. The first show was rough and my changeovers weren't "tight" enough. I spent a few hours with the offending reels and practiced and adjusted my start points to get them super tight to avoid screwing the dialogue up.

Think about all the movies (pre-digital era) that you have projected or watched as a moviegoer, and you'll realize the very pattern I am talking about. And it was a rule that transcended genres of films.

Now, we have digital. The need for physical "reels" is totally non existent. However, many editors did, and some still do, edit with the old 2000 foot break in mind. But it really is no longer necessary. Time code numbers provide to-the-frame easy access for the editorial process, so one can make the scene transitions at any time point without worrying about any cuts, breaks, or other distractions that would naturally occur with film projection. As with most things about the whole D-Cinema takeover, this is both good and bad.

The good is that one can tell the story without any concern for the drawbacks of physical reels affecting the flow or presentation of the movie. As a story writer myself, I like that idea as some of my own works would not work well on film, with forced breaks in the flow to accommodate the physical reels of film projection. (Which also explains in part why some novels adapted to the screen don't flow as well on film vs. reading the damn book.)

The bad has been becoming more obvious with the more movies I watch of late, and that is the story has NO beats to it at all, just a hellbent race to the end credits breathlessly. The visual and aural assault starts with the opening credits and ends when the file ends.

Look at some of the best of the older classic action/drama films, and you will note that the best of them have an action packed, lots of things happening sequence, intercut with some side sequences that allow the audience to catch their breath and prepare for the next action sequence. One outstanding example for me is The Empire Strikes Back. The escape from Hoth, and escape from Cloud City, Vader and Luke's fight, and so on. Same with Return Of The Jedi, the battle scenes on Endor and the fight in the Death Star are intercut masterfully, with breaks in the intense action to allow us to catch a breath.

Anyways, what do you all think? Have you noticed the changes as I have? If there are any editors/filmmakers lurking on here, what is your take on this? Do you feel, as I do, that movies are worse editorially since the digital era started, and if so, is it the fault of the presentation media (DCP vs. Film), the editorial process, the screenwriting, or just that the studios suck at moviemaking?

Have a Happy and safe Christmas and Happy New Year.

[Mike Blakesley]

Movies are definitely more "frantic" these days. The long dialogue scene is pretty much a thing of the past, at least with mainstream movies.

Where I have really noticed a difference is in the trailers. I remember a movie from the '80s called "To Live and Die in L.A." which had a trailer that had like 130 edits in it. The thing was so fast paced that there was even an article about it in Boxoffice. These days, scenes lasting more than one or two seconds in trailers are rare. I don't know how anybody makes any sense out of trailers and all the trailer editors must have A.D.D.

Every time we go to CinemaCon, I find myself getting bored with the endless trailer reels, because after about five or six trailers they all begin to look and sound the same. So occasionally to entertain myself I'll start counting seconds with every scene change, just to see if there are ever any scenes that are more than two seconds long. In a typical trailer today, there will be zero scenes more than a couple seconds long and most of them are less than a second! No wonder they all seem the same and are completely unmemorable. (Are you paying attention, trailer cutters?)

[Frank Cox]

"In a world where" is gone. I can't remember the last time I heard that, but it's been a long long time.

[Randy Stankey]

Look at some of the best of the older classic action/drama films, and you will note that the best of them have an action packed, lots of things happening sequence, intercut with some side sequences that allow the audience to catch their breath and prepare for the next action sequence. One outstanding example for me is The Empire Strikes Back. The escape from Hoth, and escape from Cloud City, Vader and Luke's fight, and so on. Same with Return Of The Jedi, the battle scenes on Endor and the fight in the Death Star are intercut masterfully, with breaks in the intense action to allow us to catch a breath.

Corben Dallas sits in the audience, mouth agape, as Diva Plavalaguna sings her own version of the Mad Aria from Lucia Di Lammermoor and, at the same time, Leeloo single-handedly kicks the crap out of six Mangalores, all the while, every single frame of action is in sync with the music.

I think that movie didn't do as well as it should have because people didn't understand it.

[Jon Dent]

Not only did they have reel lengths to consider, but they also had to physically cut film, which even being efficient is still a lot longer process than clicking a digital in/out point.

Part of the issue, I think, is that editing has gotten the same crunch that visual effects and sound editing have gotten, where there's less time and things are always changing right up to the last minute. The idea of a 'locked edit' is pretty much dead and I think the edit is a lot rougher because of it.

And yes, Fifth Element has some truly brilliant editing.

[Leo Enticknap]

I think this is as much about structure as the actual editing process, and I'm not sure that the transition from film to digital has been a huge influence in the changes we've seen.

Between around the end of WWI and the transition to sound, Hollywood perfected what Robert McKee called the three-act structure: situation-problem-resolution. The first part of the movie introduces the characters and context for the story. The second presents a problem to be solved (e.g., in Psycho, the leading character is murdered). The third is its resolution. Like the fundamental techniques of continuity editing (eyeline matching, cutting on action, the 180-degree rule, etc.), it was tried, tested, and quickly found to be reliable and popular with audiences. Try something different, and you quickly had the "arthouse" label slapped on your movie.

Other, and especially non-Anglophone film cultures didn't necessarily do this: the Soviets had their montage, Bollywood went for the more episodic, linear story, often introducing musical numbers in ways that Hollywood never did (more Brecht than Cole Porter!), and Japan introduced elements of live theater technique into their movies that were not what western audiences were used to. If some of these things are now making their way into American cinema more frequently, my guess is that technology making other film cultures more accessible (if I want to see an obscure jidai geki adaptation from the '50s, it's but a click away on a streaming service - I don't have to wait until some university film society plays it on a battered old 16mm print and have to sit on a wooden bench in a chilly lecture theater at 1am on a Tuesday morning to see it), greater migration of film industry professionals, and audiences, between national industries (nothing new there - it's just the scale of it that's increasing), and of course the indigenous audience being influenced by other cultures and technologies: hence Ridley Scott complaining that "fucking cellphones" were the reason why a high craft skill, but very traditional in terms of its structure and technique, piece of filmmaking bombed at the box office.

I hadn't really thought about the 10-minute and 20-minute reel lengths affecting structure that much, at least beyond the days of Chaplin and Griffith, when that actually defined the length of the whole movie. In Hollywood's heyday, a B-movie was 50-70 minutes, and a main feature was 90-110, with only prestige specials heading into two-hour territory, largely because of the constraints of the double feature program format.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Sometime back in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s the way most movies told their story changed. Prior to then dialogue drove the story forward. After that, action seems to drive the story with just enough dialog to tie the action scenes together. Yes, there are exceptions to this both before and after the change, but this seems to hold true regardless of genre.

At one time there was an actual post production job of determining where to place the reel breaks. I forget the actual title for the job.

Motorized projectors go back to the early 1920’s so by the mid 1920’s I doubt many silent film projectionists were hand cranking. Edison cameras were motorized from day one.

[Ed Gordon]

Ever get the feeling that movies these days have a totally different editorial "feel" or style, as compared to say films from the pre-1990's? I had noticed this for some time but it was only late last night as I was trying without success to get some sleep, that there is a very tangible difference in the flow and style of editing today...

...Anyways, what do you all think? Have you noticed the changes as I have? If there are any editors/filmmakers lurking on here, what is your take on this? Do you feel, as I do, that movies are worse editorially since the digital era started, and if so, is it the fault of the presentation media (DCP vs. Film), the editorial process, the screenwriting, or just that the studios suck at moviemaking?...

I don't think that this is an issue that has anything to do with film vs. digital, or film reel changeovers. Your observation that scene lengths have decreased in length is supported by these comments from screen writers:

Average Length of a Movie Scene (tip #21)

April 20, 2009 by Scott W. Smith


Yesterday I was reading David Bordwell’s book The Way Hollywood Tells It which as the subtitle says is a look at Story and Style in Modern Movies. Bordwell taught film studies for several decades at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (I think he recently retired.) Roger Ebert has said, “David Bordwell is our best writer on the cinema. I find this book simply astonishing.”
There is much I’d like to write about Bordwell’s book but the one thing I want to mention today is his research on the average length of a movie scene. Over the years of watching movies and reading scripts I had come up with a rough estimate of most movie scenes in American movies lasting between 1 and 3 minutes in length. (I covered this some in “Screenwriting by Numbers.”)
Well, Bordwell has come up with a more definitive answer and points to when this shift began.
“From 1930 to 1960, most films averaged 2 to 4 minutes per scene, and many scenes ran 4 minutes or more… In films made after 1961 most scenes run between 1.5 and 3 minutes. The practice reflects the contemporary screenwriter’s rule of thumb that a scene should consume no more than two or three pages (with a page counting as a minute of screen time). The average two-hour script, many manuals suggest, should contain forty to sixty scenes. In more recent years, the tempo has become even faster. All the Pretty Horses (2000) averages 76 seconds per scene, while Singles (1992) averages a mere 66 seconds. One reason for this acceleration would seem to be the new habit of getting into and out of the scenes quickly.”
David Bordwell
Page 57-58
My guess is the average length of the scenes in Crank: High Voltage that opened this weekend is probably pretty quick.
For more information about Bordwell check out his website on cinema.
Update 2/11/2011: Can’t you have a 5-6 minute scene that just has two people talking? Of course, The Social Network started with a 5-6 minute scene and was nominated for an Oscar. To pull off a 5-6 minute scene of two people talking it helps if your name is Aaron Sorkin.

There are more comments on this at the source of the quote above at https://screenwritingfromiowa.wordpr...a-movie-scene/

Be sure to follow some of the links included in the article and comments.

The other side of this is how feature editing affects the perceived pace of a film. Take one scene from Hitchcock's Psycho and look at the number of shots it contained.

See: https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Psyc...:_shot_by_shot

[Jim Cassedy]

SadEditor.jpg
This Editor Thought Errol Flynn's "Captain Blood" (1935) Was So Artistically
Photographed and Acted, & Contained So Many Great Action Scenes, That He
Just Couldn't Bring Himself To Cut A Single Frame From The Negative, According
To This Advertisement Placed By Warner Brothers In "Exhibitor's Herald"

[Frank Angel]

I do agree with Leo -- I do think cultural differences in styles and the traditional norms of story-telling are the biggest influencing factor in the way stories are shot and assembled much more so than the technology. Yes constraints on the technology will demand certain practical necessities -- when a wide CinemaScope frame became available to the filmmaker, that changed everything from image composition to timing of the shots which could change the pacing of just a scene or an entire movie. As for changeover operations, not so much. Good editors knew how to pick break points that were less risky than others to make undetectable reel changes. And while they strive for those points, it didn't seem to be anything written in stone; like most any of you who have run changeover of the years, we have all seen changeover points that broke the rules of 1) always break on a shot change 2) always break between dialogue lines 3) whenever possible break where these is no background score playing. But I have seen many reel changes that violate all three of those rules. Theoretically an editor should be able to expect a near perfect reel change (± 2 frames) that is transparent to the audience, In therey, if the projection system is working correctly an editor can make his break solely on where there is a shot change closest to the 18min runtime of that reel and not have to worry about the human element in the projection booth at the far end of the whole movie-making chain. Of course they do worry about how their editing break points will play in the projection booths of the world and hence the print of MY FAIR LADY, while yes, it is a long film (2h 50m), it could be broken down to 8 and a half reels. As it is, it was shipped on 12 reels and every one of the rules was carefully maintained so as not to avoid breaking during musical numbers. On the other hand, CAMELOT breaks in the middle of tight dialog with score playing under:

Richard Harris: ..."and the autumn leaves, they just whisk way (he pauses, then adds) at night, of course.
CHANGOVER
Vanessa Redgrave: (whimsically) "Of course."

That was VERY tight and more than a frame or two off and you would clip her line as well as cause the background CAMELOT melody to jump noticeably.

With digital of course there is no worry at all about this old system of maintaining film running continuity, but given that editors were pretty careful about the cue and countdown leader change-over system of the old days, I don't think the director an cinematographer were thinking about that farthest end of the presentation chain so as to impact how they told the story in a way that was expected by an audience. A Bollywood director certainly was more concerned that he put in a musical number early enough in his film to avoid his audience storm out of the theatre if none were forthcoming soon enough, rather than be concerned about how to make the projectionist happy in the booth..

[Jim Cassedy]

I've always been curious exactly who determined where the change-over cues were going to be placed.
Was it the main film editor, or at some point did some 2nd assistant editor or some lab-tech take over
and make cue placement decisions based on best usage of print film stock?

There's a lab-splice about 30sec before one of the change-overs in the 70mm print of LICORICE
PIZZA I'm currently running - - it makes a nice little click going through the gate that gives a bit
of advance warming that the motor cue is coming. (Although by now, I've run the print enough
that I could probably do the change-overs with my eyes closed). I once bet a friend that I could
do all the change-overs in JAWS with my eyes closed, after having already run it at that point
for for several weeks. He came up to the booth & I actually tried it. How did I do? ~~ I don't
know because I HAD MY EYES CLOSED. - - but he said all the reel changes were 'spot-on'

[Marcel Birgelen]

If we look at digital acquisition v.s. acquisition with film, the biggest difference is the availability of "instant dailies". A director now has almost instant and universal access to the material shot that day and often also to the material shot on previous shooting days. Also, modern digital cameras are less bulky than their film counterparts, which allows them to go to places where film wasn't practical.

The digital editing process is way more flexible than the traditional way of editing film. A digital edit also can combine a lot of stuff that used to be separate processes during film editing, like color timing and composition.

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't know. I've been hearing complaints about movies and the editorial pace going ADHD for 30 years. Back in the 1980's going into the 1990's MTV and music videos were the favorite scapegoat for rapid cuts and a sped-up pace.

Overall, the issue is technology and the steady, increasing level of convenience a long series of improvements has provided to the craft of "film making" to dramatically speed up the process, allow much greater levels of creativity and allow much greater levels of misuse of that technology.

Back in the silent era and going well into the full color, talkie age most movies were filmed with very static camera placement, very infrequent cuts and production design very similar to that of a stage play. They were making the Broadway experience portable to small town America. That was a big part of the thought process. Some early films were more "expressive," but it took some daring work from Europe and ground-breaking work from industry outsiders like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane to greatly shake up some stale conventions.

But that portable stage play feel still endured in many film productions going well into the Widescreen "Roadshow" era. During the late 1960's and into the early 1970's there was more interest in small gauge work with far more portable cameras. Indie productions were producing work with a more raw, real feel.

Even as filmmaking conventions changed radically in the 1970's a lot of limitations still loomed. Timing reel length was an issue. Just the basics of manually editing film was a tiresome process. Audiences and industry insiders were amazed by movies such as The French Connection and that now legendary car chase scene. Today that sequence would be relatively simple to shoot with digital cameras and edit digitally on a fucking laptop PC. 50 years ago the process was a shit ton far more difficult with a bunch of physical analog film strips.

Decades ago the setup process for any scene in a movie production was time consuming. The bigger the film gauge and the bigger the size of camera equated to far more time to set up a shot. 50 or more years ago it was common for entire scenes to play out with one single static camera angle covering the whole set. No edits. Stage play feel. That doesn't work today. Not unless you want the scene feeling like a surveillance camera angle from CSPAN. Today there is an incredible variety of cameras that allow a much greater variety of camera setups and angles. Some of the camera systems allow for much faster paced run and gun work. Can't afford to rent a Louma crane? Buy a fucking drone! It will be like a camera crane and a helicopter all in one device!

Non-linear video editing today is very easy and very accessible TO ANYONE. You can download a FREE version of DaVinci Resolve 17 right now and have professional quality tools right at your fingertips. For only $295 you can buy the whole DaVinci Resolve Studio suite. Audio editing, video editing, color correction, motion effects, etc all in that package. And it doesn't take a top of the line computer to run it either. Don't know how to use it? There are plenty of tutorial videos online and lots of documentation to walk you through it.

I'm more of an Adobe guy, given my graphics industry work. $54 per month for a full Adobe CC subscription gives you full access to every Adobe app and all their other goodies (like the Adobe Fonts service for one thing). That lets you pair Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere into a pretty damned powerful combination, especially for advertising related work. The only thing they don't have (yet) is a full-blown 3D application. Adobe is still tip-toeing that direction. You can use a "lite" version of Cinema4D in After Effects. Adobe bought out the Substance company. Unfortunately the applications like Substance Stager and Painter are a separate subscription from the other Adobe CC apps. On the other hand, Blender, a free, open source 3D modeling and animation application has been seeing a lot of steady improvement. It's getting to be less difficult to use.

If the editing pace in newer movies seems like it is sped up that could be due to production crews taking full advantage of the newer, better tools they have at their disposal.

As for story beats, those are still there. The Save The Cat! "bible" of screenwriting has not ended its tyrannical reign over movie productions and TV shows. We still have the tropes of certain things needing to happen by page 10. We still have characters with clip art quality. The action movie still needs to have the All Hope Is Lost moment on Page 110 followed by the Hero Saves the Day moment soon after that. Yeah, that stuff hasn't disappeared. At least not in conventional 2 hour movies shown in commercial theaters. More "creative" or daring work is happening in TV, where viewers get subjected to unhappy endings or complicated outcomes. But those are usually ploys to drag viewers into the next season.

Movies are definitely more "frantic" these days. The long dialogue scene is pretty much a thing of the past, at least with mainstream movies.

That all boils down to production schedules and how much time it took to set up cameras, as well as how much time was required to do editing in post production. It can be a lot faster/easier to shoot digitally and it definitely is a lot faster/easier to edit footage digitally.

I think that movie didn't do as well as it should have because people didn't understand it.

I thought The Fifth Element was pretty entertaining. It's one of the limited number of movies I've bought on DVD and Blu-ray. The same goes for Léon: The Professional. Luc Besson was at the top of his game, and at the top of the game in general during the mid 1990's. I'm still amazed by Natalie Portman's performance in that movie; she was just a kid then. Gary Oldman? Well, that's another actor who won an Oscar in later films.

[Randy Stankey]

If we look at digital acquisition v.s. acquisition with film, the biggest difference is the availability of "instant dailies".

Jerry Lewis would differ with you on that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assist

[Bobby Henderson]

Speaking of music videos and rapid fire editing, I think this 1985 music video from the German metal band Accept qualifies as a fore-runner of The Matrix' "bullet time."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXZQA1Wcxo0

The video's director, Zbigniew Rybczynski, made a number of visually challenging music videos in the 1980's with a variety of different music acts. The one with Accept was very simple in concept, but difficult to edit. If any non-linear video editing technology even existed back then at all it must have been very limited based on the very primitive computing technology that existed during that time. Lots of music videos back then were shot on 16mm film. I'm a bit foggy on how they were edited. Was that all done on film or was the footage transferred to video prior to editing? Either way the editing tools back then were nowhere near as powerful as the tools of today.