ABSTRACT

The democratisation of film and video production and the advent of portable cameras have meant a shift away from the Hollywood sound stage, where highly-trained technicians work in controlled studio environments, towards more spontaneous location shooting. In any creative endeavour, there is pressure to be innovative. The pressure can either come from without or within. Innovation, by its nature, presents problems. In digital video editing, some such problems arise from the development of new technologies that propagate the number of available choices and the accompanying decisions to be made. Early filmmakers were restricted to using a large immovable camera that recorded a single wide-view of the action. Because of the static perspective, the novelty soon wore off and audiences possibly decided that live theatre was more compelling than these early films. Film editors are often focused on technical problems that crop up.