ABSTRACT

Nonlinear Editing So why do they call it nonlinear editing? The label “nonlinear” basically means that we are not limited by the linear characteristic of videotape. For example, if you want to preview a shot in a digital editing system, just a click will open it up on the screen in a fl ash, and another click will instantly position you on any frame within that shot. A nonlinear system allows us to move around in the footage in any direction, instantaneously. On videotape, if the shot we wanted to preview happened to be at the end of the tape, we would have to wait while the tape fast forwarded to the cue point; and if the next shot we wanted to preview happened to be at the head of the tape, we’d have to rewind all the way to the beginning again. Even more signifi cantly, however, is the fact that, with digital editing, we can delete (or insert) a shot anywhere along our edited sequence and all succeeding shots will move up to close the gap or push down to accommodate the new shot. In short, inserting or deleting shots has no effect on the other shots in the sequence. At this point, I can imagine a young fi lm student, weaned exclusively on hard drives and data, blinking hard and saying “Yeah? So?” The fact is, there are those of us who, in the dark ages, struggled with tape-to-tape video editing, which is essentially a process of rerecording material from a source tape directly onto a record tape. We remember a time when you would string together, say, twenty-fi ve edits, only to realize that you wanted to insert a new shot after edit #4. Videotape’s “linearity problem” meant that if you inserted (literally recorded) a new shot #5, you covered over the old shot #5 and so had to rerecord it as shot #6, which covered over the next shot, which you had to then re-lay, and so on. Every time you inserted or deleted a shot in an existing sequence you had to re-lay every shot that came after that point. I’d rather not contemplate the hours of my life I lost doing exactly this in videotape editing rooms. Digital editing, on the other hand, never actually lays any media down onto tape until you are completely done editing. Instead, it uses the computer’s RAM (random access memory) to perpetually “preview” all of the edits in your program. You can insert shots, delete shots, rearrange sequences, and build several versions and still make it home in time to get eight hours of sleep. So the term “nonlinear editing” was introduced to announce that, while digital editing was done electronically, it didn’t have video’s “linearity problem,” and hearing this, we all traded in our play decks, record deck, and RM440 edit controllers for a mouse and a hard drive, in record time!