Non-Linear edition's importance in today's media (or "Remember how edition was like 30 years ago?")

Ah, the 60's!!!

The music, the colors, the movies, the clothing, the hair, the forcefully linear edition...

When someone who knows about edition, or knows something about the entertainment business talks about linear edition, you can almost see the goosebumps popping in his' or her's skin. Linear edition was tedious, boring, and extremely difficult. Imagine having to take a look at a whole tape, looking for the right shot the producer or director wants. You'd need at least two VCR's ( and not any VCR, if you want your video to look just right), a switcher, a mixer, at least two monitors's, a big bunch of cables, and a thumbs-up editor, for when your boss shouts at you "I like that!! Tag it!!!"

Then along came CMX 600 in 1971 , and all our problems were solved. It recorded & played back black-and-white analog video recorded in "skip-field" mode on modified disk pack drives the size of washing machines. The 600 had a console with 2 monitors built in. The right monitor, which played the preview video, was used by the editor to make cuts and edit decisions using a light pen. The left monitor was used to display the edited video. A Digital PDP-11 computer served as a controller for the whole system.

After that came LucasFilm's EditDroid in the 80's (the name is obviously influenced by Lucas' Star Wars trilogy) and the Avid1 as the first in it's line of Media Composer systems in 1989. I actually saw an Avid1, and even pressed it's buttons (that sounds a bit primitive, but I was only 5 back then. The term "computer" and "delicate equipment" meant nothing to me)

Avid then forged it's status as market leader in edition software, but two new cowboys were about to enter the scene. The first one was Adobe Premiere, which was launched in 1992 but only became a serious threat to Avid in 1995. And the other one was Final Cut Pro, in 1999, back when good ol' Steve Jobs was rocking the computer world after NeXT was bought by Apple in 1996.

The thing about non-linear editing, is you can 2 two different parts of the movie at a time, or you can easily find that scene you are looking in tape 2, without having to scan the whole movie again. It's all 1's and 0's, baby

While Avid Media Composer is mainly used by big Hollywood filmmakers, Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere have found their way into the hearts of young (and not so young) independent filmmakers around the worlds. Final Cut Pro's user base is 49% percent of all professional editors, with Avid at 22%.

All this serves to a purpose: an introduction to a series of tips, lessons, secret features and many other things I'll be publishing in the next couple days, so stay tuned if you are interested in learning how to make your vacation video even more neat!!!

Until Next time!!!

Final Cut Pro
Avid
Adobe Premier
Video Editing

Video and Television postproduction editing in Mexico