Nonlinear Editors on Nonlinear Editing
by Kimberly Reed
Last year, DV Technical Editor Kimberly Reed hosted a panel discussion on the state of nonlinear editing as craft and art as well as a technology. The first of these discussions took place at the Digital Video Production Workshop (DVPW) seminars at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas in April. That panel, which consisted of Avid Cofounder and Chief Editor Tom O'Hanian, BAVC Online Editor Heather Weaver, Discreet New Media Product Evangelist/video editing professional Frank Black, and independent producer/Media 100 user Bill Weaver, touched on everything from technology past and present to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. A good time was had by all. Such a good time, in fact, that the organizers of DV Expo asked Kim and company to repeat their performance at the Digital Video Conference and Exposition in Long Beach this past October.
That panel included a couple of new participants and a couple veterans from the DVPW. As you'll see, the discussion started with war stories, moved on to wish lists and personal Holy Grail quests, and then got down to the nitty gritty of life as a nonlinear editor doing battle on the frontlines of nonlinear editing. The following contains highlights from that discussion.
The Panelists
Frank Black, new media product evangelist for Discreet edit and paint, lifelong professional video editor. Bona fides: As a self-described dyslexic teenager, Frank spent two weeks on a Telemation system typing the credits that make up the (very long) end of the legendary animated short, "Bambi vs. Godzilla."
Bryce Button, owner and operator of Random Axis, a postproduction facility in Colorado. Bona fides: Bryce is a certified Avid instructor who also uses Discreet edit.
Mark Horton, marketing manager for editing technology at Quantel. Bona fides: He made his first edit in 1979 and has worked as an editor in post houses in London and Denmark.
Heather Weaver, professional video editor at the Bay Area Video Coallition (BAVC) in San Francisco. Bona fides: Her day consists of finishing documentaries that are destined for the rigorous qualification standards at PBS. Her tool of choice is about a million bucks' worth of linear online editing suite.
First Time
DV: Everyone who calls themselves a professional editor has a story about their earliest experiences on the job. Anyone care to share first-time stories?
Button: My first job was in South Africa in the 80s. Yes, there were sanctions on, but there were a lot of films being made there at that time for tax-break reasons. It was my job to get a prop knife up the side of a mountainside to where the shoot was taking place. The first truck they gave me got stuck in the mud and broke an axle. The second truck also got stuck in the mud and broke an axle. Deciding that I had better hurry, I decided to swim across the river that was at the base of this hill. I started swimming with the knife between my teeth, only to have the knife come loose and sink. I searched underwater but never recovered the darned thing. So I climbed the hill, got to the top, and had them tell me, "You've provided a lot of entertainment for a good half-hour. We couldn't shoot anything because of all the tires spinning in the mud, but we decided to go with the gun."
Horton: My first foray into editing went like this: You go to college, you get a degree, you turn up at the post house, and they say, "You don't know anything. Go out and get the pizzas." So that was my introduction to the world of professional editing, though the first real job I had involved a medical program and an endoscope. But I don't think we should go into that right now [laughs].
Black: I started in a post house back in '79. My experience was just like Mark Horton's. You come out of school with your degree and think you're a real bad-ass of the production world. The next Fellini. And you find yourself emptying the trash and running tapes around L.A. So I worked my way up from tape op-ping. One day, someone couldn't make it in and I found myself sitting in the editing room.
Weaver: BAVC is a nonprofit, multimedia arts facility founded by the Rockefeller Foundation to give non-profits, artists, and independent produc-ers access to the same tools that the big broadcast companies have. We're also a training facility and a full-service post house. I've worked on everything from PSAs to 30-second spots to 90-minute long-form documentaries, but I started just like everybody else-as an intern making the coffee. I was lucky that I'd had some CMX experience, so I was able to freelance as an editor, but that didn't get me out of taking the trash out.
DV: You were both an intern and a CMX editor?
Weaver: Yes. An online editor and a coffee maker.
War stories
Button: We had a client who told us that at the end of a clip, he wanted us to cut to nothing. Fine. We put black in. That was not acceptable. He said again, "I need you to have nothing at the end of the cut." Taking a stab in the dark, we proceeded to put pure white in. That didn't work either. The client got up and started pounding on my monitor, saying, "There needs to be nothing here." At which point I didn't quite understand what he was going on about.
It just happened that we had a VHS machine that was plugged into the system and swapping over on the router with no control track, so it was putting out a bunch of snow. "That's it! That's nothing," he said. At which point, we explained that if we ever sent out a show like that, we'd prob-ably never get business with any cable or network channel again. But he wanted "nothing."
Horton: Some guys from a top-notch advertising agency in London had hired us to work on a commercial that was going to be transmitted in Pakistan. This was in the early 80s. They spent ages and ages working on getting the colors on this thing just right. What would usually happen is they'd set up the colors in the morning, go out for lunch, and get really drunk. It would be a bright day outside, so they'd come back and say, "Oh, the colors are different." And then the friends of the agency guys would turn up, followed by the girlfriends of the friends of the agency guys, and everyone would have a different opinion and we'd spend ages working on the colors. Meanwhile, this very quiet Pakistani guy was sitting in the back of the suite with a big smile on his face, sipping his coffee, looking very happy. At the end of two-and-a-half days, it's time for the big sign-off. Everyone from the agency is happy. The friends of the friends of the guys from the agency are happy. And they turn to the Pakistani guy and ask, "Are you happy with the result?"
He said, "This is great. Fantastic. I love all this. You know, we should have color in Pakistan in a few years' time, and by then this will be so useful."
Black: I was working with an unnamed agency here in town (L.A.)-a very large one-and we were doing an Ivory Soap commercial. The commercial was pretty much done, but the art direc-tor and the director got in this huge fight over the font and color of the text under the soap. This fight escalated and they got to pushing and shoving each other. And I'm covering up the switcher, trying to keep them from falling on it. I mean, we're billing $700 an hour and they're fighting over the color of the text under the soap. It escalated into a complete brawl, where they were just beating the crap out of each other in the room. The director was a big guy, and he picked up the art director and threw him through the sliding glass door to the machine room, which took out a bunch of Ampex tape decks. I sat there and said, "I'm outta here, man. This is not for me. I gotta find something else."
I went and bought a Convergence CS900 system and a couple of 3/4-inch decks and started doing offline editing. At the time, there was no nonlinear editing, but I was able to do offline with that Convergence and an edit list management program.
Advice and Consent
During the course of the panelists' discussion, an audience member asked if the panelists could share any survival tips. Here's a sampling of what they had to offer:
Your clients are likely to be watching the offline process on an old S-VGA monitor. When they get into the online room, they're looking at a grade-A monitor and complaining the color is different. Don't allow the offline system to be used for decision-making on color.
Decide up-front whether you want to charge by the project or by the hour. Guessing wrong can cost you big bucks, especially on big projects.
If you've got a server-based system, make sure you've got a mechanism in place for archiving, because even very large servers get full. And the day will come when a Coca-Cola or Pepsi comes rolling in and says, "Look, we've got a crash job. Can you do this for us overnight?" You don't want to turn them away because your server is filled up.
In search of Holy Grails
DV: We could probably tell war stories all day long, but let's talk a little about gear. What piece of gear would you like to see that doesn't currently exist?
Weaver: I've found that a lot of nonlinear editing systems are deficient in their color-correction tools; but I was just working on a Discreet smoke system and found that-well, they have nice color-correction tools, but it also has these great Photoshop-like capabilities right inside their system. You can paint out dropouts and paint over film dirt and scratches. They've also got cloning tools and reveal tools, those types of things that, as an online editor, I feel we need more of. I'd like to see those kinds of tools developed even more.
Button: I've been on a nonlinear system since '88. At the end of the day, what shocks me is that I don't find enough features that fulfill the promise of what computers were supposed to be good at: killing repetitive motion injuries. What I don't understand is why, in all this time, can't I literally write a script that says, "Put this commercial down here between this point and that point, insert black, insert color bars, insert slate, etc." And it would script the whole process. If you look at the prepress industry and what's happened with AppleScript, it's all automated. Even on the most advanced NLEs, there's way too much manual work going on for the repetitive, noncreative stuff. The inability to script macros is the biggest thing missing from the tools at this point in time.
Black: Whether you run After Effects or Photoshop or Quantel or Discreet or Avid or whatever, there's so much good software and hardware out there. The biggest problem we face as manufacturers and as users is getting all these damn things to talk to each other on a metadata level. I think that's the biggest disenabler of the entire non-linear revolution.
At the linear base of it all, you had your tape, you walked in, you walked out. Computer-based media has created the nightmare of trying to get files in and out of each other's systems. I know there's a consortium of manufacturers trying to address this with AAF [Advanced Authoring Format; for details see the Roundtable discussion on AAF in DV, Aug. '99]. But that solution is kind of a long way off. I mean, Discreet and Avid are trying to get their tools to conform to each other, and QuickTime has offered a lot of good solutions at the media file level, but we as manufacturers are way behind. We need to be able to step out of the process and compete on our tools' strengths, and not lock out users with formats.
Horton: I agree with Frank. If you go back to when I started, things were very complicated. With analog technology, you had to line up your one-inch tape machines, do this and that, get levels right, getting the machines to lock, all of which carried a very high engineering overhead. During the 80s when D-1 came along, that got simpler. And around '94 or '95, you had very low engineering overhead when you had Digital Betacam coming along. We had gotten to a very simple point there, but now things have gotten more complicated again. You've now got lots of different compression schemes going around, bit depths, temporal resolutions, spacial resolutions, file formats, file formats that aren't properly documented, or file formats that are documented but the guys won't tell you what's in there. There's a big need to simplify all of that to make it easier to get a project through from start to finish.
Button: Can I play devil's advocate here? Is this not happening to a large degree? If you look at the history of OMF and various other standardized choices that have been out there, vendors are still doing this to differentiate their prod-ucts. And it's still marketplace driven. Keep them separate.
Horton: Avid, Discreet, and Quantel are in the AAF consortium. In fact, I'm a member of the AAF group. We're trying to sort that situation out. One of the problems the industry has is that, unlike years ago when you had very large public service broadcasters and very large private broadcasters, which were few in number but very active in SMPTE and IEEE and the various organi-zations like that, standards only became standards it they're a standard. OMF was never an official standard. The other problem was that OMF was owned by a single manufacturer, Avid. Avid itself recognized that problem, and that's why various other people are approaching AAF together to try and make a standard that can be recognized, legislated, and documented.
Black: My personal feeling is that the marketplace has dictated that the most open system is going to win. If you look at an Avid, you used to be able to only import a PICT file. Now we've got all these great import/export tools where pretty much any kind of bitmap file or TGA or TIFF or whatever can come in and out. Our own products, especially on the NT side with QuickTime, kind of function the same way. I think all the major manufacturers are opening up to accept multiple file formats and getting away from proprietary codecs.
When you get over into the big-iron side-the SGI kind of side-it becomes more difficult to accomplish. And it's not as necessary to have open systems because your finishing material originates in a box.
Horton: It's definitely the case that if we-Discreet and Quantel and Avid-didn't get together to do this stuff, it would be getting much worse very very quickly with the 18 or more HD formats that are going to be kicking around. It's going to be an absolute nightmare.
DV: Heather, as an online linear editor, what's your take on all of this? Is your only worry being able to get an EDL to work with? Are you ever going to trust an offline editor to do color-correction?
Weaver: Generally, offline editors are really excellent with sitting, working with clients, and being able to work out how to tell a story. When it comes to color-correction, that's something I do all day. If offline color-correction info doesn't necessarily transfer, then it's not as big a deal. When I edit, I have to look at everything to make sure that it either passes PBS specs or that it is within limits for tape-to-film transfers. And for those, there are very stringent limits on where the video signal needs to be. The video signal is not negotiable, so those are the types of things that aren't going to transfer. But if someone were to take a lot of time in the offline process to make a five-layer effect with lots of zooming titles, that would take me ages to re-create. In my linear suite, I have to do it by eye. As I see it, one of the benefits of having an Avid Symphony is being able to do this whole conform thing where all you have to do is redigitize and let those parts rerender.
Black: The biggest problem we run into is the "monkey on a keyboard" syndrome. There's a huge difference between doing online finishing and conforming. The conforming process is just rebuilding somebody else's stuff, but that's not necessarily finishing.
I believe talent rules, but we're going through a period with nonlinear editing that's similar to what happened to when desktop publishing, where anybody can be an editor now with a G3 and Final Cut or whatever-$1999.95 and there you are. So it really comes down to talent. I know a lot of creative offline guys who can't set up a TBC, let alone finish a project. Their audio is completely distorted because they have these crappy little speakers instead of real DVW monitors. But they're doing online.
Button: Surely if they don't evolve, they won't survive. The editor and the online/offline process is not split anymore. You may break your time with a client into the two different processes, cutting story one or two days and then doing finishing on yet another day, but not changing anything because you've got to concentrate on finishing.
Black: But to me, that's where the talent comes in. I'm an editor. I can lay off fonts, do the titling, the kerning, and all that stuff. But there's nothing like getting graphic artists to work with an editor because they have the talent. They've got the eye. What they can do with a font or a shadow is light years beyond anything I can do. The same is true for audio guys and creative storytellers. But it's talent, not equipment or process.
Button: Except that equipment can evolve to reflect that. So what I'm driving at is that all this seems to be pushing towards networked workflow. Trying to differentiate offline from online and bumping and redigitizing and all that is totally insane if you essentially move to a model where everything's on one server and you plug in talent on workstations that connect to the server. You put the talent where it's needed. And you have the strengths of each user, but essentially it's one timeline. It's one set of media.
DV: Can you describe the workflow in your facility? Who wears what hat?
Button: It's an interesting setup we have at the moment. We are all independent. We have a graphic artist, a sound gentleman, a couple of 3D artists, and someone who owns the online finishing system. We use a variety of tools-ProTools for audio, 3D Studio MAX for 3D. We have edit and flint. All are owned by individuals who themselves are separate corporations. Physically, we're in a large building and we've Etherneted everything under the sun. We have one fat DSL pipe that comes into the house. On a project-by-project basis, depending on what sort of bent the project has. Let's say it's 3D. Then the person who is the 3D company takes the lead. But we're essentially pooling all the time. Without networking, we could not work at the speed and have the ability to make the changes that we must have. The biggest change in my life as an editor in the last two years is being able to work collaboratively with everyone involved in the process. Being an editor, the biggest thing I do is set the pace. Instead of doing it the traditional way, where the picture gets cut and then it gets handed off to the sound guy and then the graphic artists and so on, we're constantly doing rough edits.
DV: Which is why the terms online and offline editing are so confusing.
Horton: What online means is changing right now. Worldwide, we see much more compositing being done in the online stage. There are several factors behind this change. One is that the number of channels is going up and up and up. A lot more money is being put into the look of programs, especially into trailers and promos for them, as well as into program graphics-diagrams and explanations. Another factor is that techniques pioneered in digital filmmaking for doing crowd replication and set dressing are increasingly coming under the mission of the finishing bay. Increasingly, you're seeing programs that are a mixture of real and artificial elements, but the special effects are designed to be 100 percent invisible. They're there to enhance the story line.
DV: With the distinction between online and offine collapsing, how do you see the life of a freelance edi-tor changing?
Button: I do a lot of out-of-house freelancing. It's amazing how much equipment I have to carry around with me now. I literally carry a PowerBook that has Photoshop and After Effects on it. I carry a 100BaseT Ethernet cable so I can plug right into a network without thinking about it, because I don't want to deal with the Zip hassles. On a personal level, I've had to spread my knowledge base. There are times when that annoys me, because I'd like to be dealing just with cutting, but the clients are coming to expect it. The other thing, though, is that even as a freelancer, I find myself delegating more. I bring people to part of the process and literally stick them in the Avid editing bay with me and, for instance, say, "Joy here is going to be doing this graphics part so I can get on with it," in terms of what I'm best at, which is storytelling.
DV: Heather, what about from an online editor's point of view?
Weaver: Generally, when people come to BAVC to work, they've done offlines on Avids or Media 100s and they don't have access to the finishing tools that I use in my suite-not everyone can afford to have a $150,000 box sitting in their houses. So what I see as a freelance online editor is that you need to know your system and know it well. It's hard to hop system to system. Every manufacturer calls their buttons different things and sometimes it's a little frustrating. The best advice I can give offline editors is to know how your system integrates with the system you will be finishing on if you're not finishing on the system that you're offlining on.
Button: You have to know more than one system today, though. I mean, it's a tool thing. When I started editing film, we had moviolas and flatbeds. It was a lot different working on a standup moviola than it was cutting on a flatbed. But tools are tools as part of the craft. It's integrating technically with what you're doing with your hands. With your vision. It's dangerous to get into bed with just one product. You've got to spread it around a little, because clients have their own preferences. Especially as a freelancer, you don't necessarily know what you're going to be facing. If one system goes down in a house, you may be forced to hop to the next bay.
Escaping Ruts
What did our panelists have to say when asked how they break out of creative ruts? How can you take your work to the next level?
Bryce Button stays up all night, creating his own projects. He adds, "When I go through periods where the work I'm doing for clients isn't particularly enjoyable, I'll literally go out and shoot stuff with DV cameras and muck with it, just to push myself. You always have to be a self-starter to get anywhere in this business. So if things aren't good for you, go out and make your own opportunities."
For Heather Weaver, the collaborative environment presented by the talented people she works with provides ample feedback for jump-starting the creative juices.
"Yeah, I think peers are your best route," Frank Black agrees. And then, he points out, "I go to NAB and get so supercharged from talking to artists who are running the tools. 'You did what with what?! Jeez, I didn't know you could do that.'"
On Producers
DV: How have producers responded to new editing technologies? We've heard that some feel they don't save any money by going nonlinear.
Black: They could've been saving money for the last eight years if they managed the process. Honestly, the process is not that much different than what good producers have been doing for the last 20 years. You know, viewing their tapes, logging them, making some selects. A good producer, even back in 1979, would come in and say, "Okay, kid. Here it is. Reel five at timecode xxx, go down to here. I want an in here. I want an out here. And I want to slide it around to see what works." They've got it down. They're done their homework. The difference is that they're not using the tools. They're not scheduling time to batch digitize before the session. Or they're not going to a post facility that has those capabilities. Or that offline talent. But many producers are not being smart. They're dinosaurs.
Button: I would argue that the gen-eral level of production or producers' knowledge has declined in comparison to where technology and to where we as editors have had to go. Being on the post end, we've had to move with the technology or we're out of business. I still find many producers are frankly work-ing on models that just don't make any sense for where the industry is actually at right now. And they're sluggish about moving there.
So there's a lot more client education on the post end, trying to help producers to help them save money, because they'll often waste a terrible amount of money in the shoot not understanding how to do the simplest bluescreen to bring into post. Or what can and can't be done because they think they can fix everything in post. Editors tend to get weeded out on the job. They either make it on the job or they go "foop." Producers can always go out and create the next job with the same lack of knowledge they had the first time around.
DV: Heather, BAVC has had to deal with a wide range of expertise, from "Here's my travel footage that I shot on my Hi8 camcorder with lots of drop-outs and no timecode" to Academy Award-winning documentaries. How do you handle ill-prepared producers?
Weaver: We make sure we have a lot of meetings ahead of time. We discuss the project and the budget up front. If you don't talk about the money, in the end you're going to find out that they didn't have funding for what they wanted you to do. Or they didn't realize that your scanning of those images wasn't a personal favor. So those are the types of things that need to be sorted out at the very beginning.
Black: The thing about all of this is that today is a fabulous time of opportu-nity for postproduction people and for cre-ative people. Because producers want to save money and make money. As a postproduction professional, whether you're a graphic artist or an editor or a creative whatever, if you can work with your producers to show them how to save money and add value, you will build a repeat business. Those people will come back because you add value to their businesses.
On Broadband
DV: One thing we haven't touched on yet is the effect broadband Internet services will have on our livelihoods.
Button: Right. Who's going to care about NTSC-safe colors if that's not what your delivering on? We're in for a fascinating time. I find it thrilling. What it does is change the process. You're going to have to do a totally different type of color setup from one form of delivery to another. Just something as simple as even going to the Web right now using the smallest of QuickTime movies-for that I don't care about interlacing. I don't care about color saturation. So I'm literally having to go through two or three reworkings of the same original or acquired digital information. So it gets back to flexibility.
Horton: This gets back to what I said about the need for technical expertise narrowing and now it's coming back again. A lot of us from Quantel come from traditional television backgrounds where quality was important. We had quite a lot of depressing conversations with people saying, "Oh no, no, no. Quality doesn't matter anymore. It's all numbers. You just stick it in and it all comes out absolutely fine." Of course, all the new technolo-gies coming along-DVD, MPEG-2 transmission, HD, Digital Cinema-are extremely quality sensitive again. And you ignore the technical side of them at your peril.
Excerpted from: http://www.dv.com
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