Brief Insight into Nonlinear Editing

Imagine that before the advent of digital video, you just finished shooting a short film in 35mm format with the intention of it being 20 minutes in length. The project is on a deadline, but you are nowhere near finished because the film must be previewed and edited ”not only to fit the 20-minute time constraint but also to tell your story more effectively. Of course you understand that less can often be more, so you use this philosophy to your advantage. After taking the film to the lab to be processed , you get in return several large reels with hours of footage. Now you are ready to sit at the editing machine and edit through hours of your story to determine what is relevant to the story line and what should be discarded.

With the reel on one side of the editing machine, the length of the film is fed through a preview window, where the technician can physically assess and cut away any irrelevant scenes. Now if you want to add a scene from a different reel, you would have to preview the location to start your sequence and then physically tape together the two ends of the film so it will look like you are cutting from one sequence to the next on the big screen. This is normally referred to as splicing.

Well, that s video editing in a nutshell . It s just cutting and pasting scenes to better illustrate the final story. But notice that by using the old way, you have to work in the same chronological order as you filmed your scenes to edit your reels. The luxury of accessing different scenes in your short film randomly is not an option. You have to go through every frame to get to the location that you want to access. You are working in a linear fashion!

So what is the big deal about nonlinear editing? Nonlinear editing (NLE) is the random access of video storage, and this is synonymous with digitized film imagery. After your material is digitized, you can use your video-editing program to place on your hard disk only the sequences that are needed to tell a better story. Once on your system s disk, the footage is brought into a video-editing suite such as NewTek s Video Toaster or Adobe s Premiere to enable you to further organize and enhance your story with digital ease and speed. Not only does this give the editor greater creative options, but time is money and that s the business. All software packages will enable you to edit on a timeline, and most will have a suite of special effects to visually enhance your story. After the story is edited on the timeline, you can save it to the editing systems format.