[Frameworks] Linear film editing

[Scott Dorsey]

No, Dave is right on.

In the beginning, we had film editing, and film editing was great.  You

could put anything anywhere.

Then, we had videotape, and although you could kind of razor-blade quad
tape, most videotape editing was done by dubbing scenes one at a time from
one video machine to another.  It was horrible, horrible torture and required
extensive planning and preparation.  If you have not encountered videotape
editing, there are a couple youtube videos which begin to show what an 
excruciating process it was.  It was "linear editing" because the tape was 
one long sequence that could not be interrupted... you could assemble a shot
to the end of the tape or you could insert a shot over an existing section of
tape, but the scene that was at 1:30 on the tape was always going to be at
1:30 unless you wiped it and dubbed from the original over someplace else.

Video editing was SO BAD that there were productions that were shot on video,
kinescoped for editing, and then transferred back to video with all of the
conequent loss and annoying artifacts... just to avoid videotape editing.

When video people began to be able to do nonlinear editing, it was a total
revolution for them.  Most of them were people who had never experienced
film editing (because videotape editing was so repulsive that nobody EVER
moved from film to videotape work), and so it was a total revelation to them
that they could just cut the sequence and add a scene in here or take the
last three frames of a scene out there.

It was utterly amazing what a revolution it was for the video people.  For
film people, online editing was kind of nice and cut down the costs of 
workprints and made it easy to do multiple cuts for comparison purposes.
But for video people it was a total, total change to finally be able to
edit the way film people could.
--scott