What is editing?
Film and video editing can be defined as complex or simple as we like, so we'll try to settle in middle ground. The process may be defined as the phase of the production where the narrative structure is completed taking its final shape and hopefully creating an interesting and comprehensible audiovisual product. But editing is more than assembling shots and defining durations because implies concepts less tangibles such as rhythm, emotion and art; most of them defined by the talent of the artist in the process of blending all the elements availables (images, sounds, dialogues, music, visual effects, graphics and even the silence as a powerful dramatic resource).
Editors usually operate hidden to the general public which enjoy their talent as part of the whole film or video and because of this perhaps the greatest compliment is when their work goes unnoticed and the viewers get totally absorbed with the narrative. Good editors are generally skillful storytellers with a deep dominion of the grammar of film and television languages in its technical, structural and psychological aspects.
In the beginning the editing process was done cutting and taping pieces of film in the desired order in a flatbed mechanical device such as the Steinbeck. The ability to execute a nonlinear montage was a trademark of film editing being the whole concept behind the cutting process that when you juxtapose two different images you alter the perception of the viewer having the power of generate a psychological idea no necessarily deduced from the content present in the shots if considered separately. Russian early filmmakers such as Lev Kulechov and Serguei Eisenstein researched deeply into the relationships that could be established between images altering their order of montage and relative durations.
With the later development of the videotape (magnetig recording of video signals) the age of editing arrived to the television industry adapting film editing procedures to the new media. Until the 70’s video editing inherited the strictly linear nature of the tape recording processes with continual narrations that were unable to be modified without electronically re-recording material. From an editorial point of view this approach was inferior to the creative flexibility obtained from the non-linear characteristic of film editing, but with the development of powerful computers and storage the video production slowly got the same advantages that one time were exclusive of film. From this point on video editing was sub classified in two groups: electronic video editing (the old way of editing through successive recordings on video tape) and nonlinear video editing which use computers to accomplish the process.
Today even film editing is mainly executed in computers that manipulate the scanned film as digital media or smallers proxies from them. Digital cinema is here to stay as the next step in the evolution of the art and science of filmmaking securing the way for a total convergence between the film and video editing processes.