Editing has changed over the years as film makers had desires of wanting to do more on their films. In the earliest films there wasn’t even editing as they were done with one shot. A great example of film makers that made films like that were the Lumiere Brothers. They were the first to make a film and it was just one shot of all the action. They used the camera to edit in a sense as when it went to the next story it went black and the next shot came on. It was the first of its kind. The lumiere made these films in the 1885.
This then progressed as the audience wanted more from the films and film maker George melles invented the stop trick this was when an object is filmed, then the camera is turned off while the camera is off, the object is moved out of sight of the camera, then the camera is turned back on. When the film is watched it thus seems to the viewer that object disappears. This effect created a fascination of film with the audience. Although this was a new technique it was still the lumieres way of storytelling as it was with one shot.
Then in 1902 George melles made the trip to the moon, this film was the first time that you could see narrative using different scene.
If you watch very carefully you could see he used a fade transition to show time has passed that was a very inventive effect in that time. As you see near the end of the first scene before it finishes he fades it in to a new scene to show they are linked in the narrative.
Editing then moved on from just showing that one scene was connected to another to following the action and following a character a good example of this is the great train robbery
Nearly the whole film you’re following the main 4 characters. One thing that you see is this film that you didn’t in all the others was cutaway. This was when the telegraph operator gets rescued by a young lady. It was the first to attempt parallel cutting as you can see as it cuts from the train robbers to the posse. This cutaway is placed to create a dramatic question.
A better example of parallel cutting is in D.W Griffiths work he was the first film maker who was able to intercut inside a scene.
As you see he uses parallel cutting when you see the two tramps who stole the money and who have the young women with them and her co worker who is trying to catch up with them by train. Suspense is added by cross-cutting as you want to know the outcome at the end.
He was also the first to move the camera along with the action, you can see this when you see a tracking shot of the chase between the train and the push train.
D.W Griffth is known as the creator of continuity editing as you can see from the early work of his you can see he matches action from one shot to another . You can see in the clip bellow.
As you see a 1min in the film you see the man with the hat opening a door on the exterior and then cutting in to the interior and see him coming in. this made it easier to connect two separate locations.
In the time of griffth , melles and the Lumieres they were using real film to film their stuff so they were editing by cutting and pasting together pieces of film, using a splicer and threading the film on a machine.
Years and years later in 1920 TV was commercially available and they had a different way of editing as they used to use 3 cameras to film and they edit between them. The earliest program they used to edit that way with was The Queen's Messenger
As you see they used two cameras in this one, you see one had a wide shot and one had a medium close up. They were still editing film the same way that griffth , melles did.
Then came video tapes in the 1940s which meant they were using liner editing which means the videos has to be fast forward and then rewound on two tape decks and two tapes when editing it. One tape is the source tape which has all the footage which is filmed and the other is a blank tape on which you selectively copy footage from the first tape on to. The idea is to record only those parts of the source tape you want to keep. In this way desired footage is copied in the correct order from the original tape to a new tape. The new tape becomes the edited version. it’s called linear because you have to start with the first shot and work through to the last shot. The draw backs to linear edit is that if at any time the editor make makes a mistakes or changes his mind it’s impossible to go back and change it so you would have to start new with a new tape.
As technology leaped and got better the invention of non liner editing came about. This was because of the creation of computers in the early 20th centre. No linear meant video footage is recorded (captured) onto a computer hard drive and then edited using specialized software. Once the editing is complete, the finished product is recorded back to tape or optical disk. The great advantage of non linear editing was how flexible it was it allowed you to make changes to any part of the video at any time. That is why it was called non linear because it was the opposite to linear.
Although that was a leap from linear editing there was still more to change. This is why they were a big leap when digital non liner editing came to be. This is because of the invention of personal computers; they were compact and had software which meant you can do some much more with videos.
An example of something which only came to be because of computers and the new software was cg1
As you can see in star wars it was used very heavily and without the inventions of computers this type of editing would have not been possible
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