Reflecting in the early 2000s on the huge success he found the first time he edited a major motion picture using an entirely nonlinear digital editing platform—earning two Academy Awards for his work on The English Patient (1997), one for sound editing and the other, the first ever given for picture editing using nonlinear technology—famed editor Walter Murch looked both back and ahead when contextualizing his beloved industry’s transition from analog, linear film editing into the digital, nonlinear, random-access realm. In interviews with his friend Michael Ondaatje, author of the book on which The English Patient was based, Murch suggested that film editing was still in something of an in-between phase in terms of where it had been and where it might be heading.

On the one hand, Murch said, basic editing concepts had hardly changed at all. “Three things you are deciding are: what shot shall I use? Where shall I begin it? Where shall I end it?”¹

On the other hand, even at that early moment of the digital revolution, Murch was hungry for what he saw looming just ahead—a more democratic editing landscape in which tools were accessible, affordable, more powerful, and flexible: the kind of landscape, in other words, that is now available to you as film students. It’s an environment Murch had been dreaming about since even before he and Francis Ford Coppola penned a paper in the early 1970s for Paramount Studios specifically proposing a digital nonlinear methodology for editing the original Godfather (1972).² At the time, such a proposal was rejected as unwieldy. After all, early nonlinear systems just being born around that time were massively expensive and required disk drives the size of household appliances. They were large, expensive, and cumbersome, and they relied on physical media (like videotape) for storage—a huge limiting factor.

Years later, following his English Patient breakthrough, Murch knew that even more freedom was on its way for editors. That dream came to fruition in 2003, when he became the first editor to cut a studio feature—Cold Mountain, for English Patient director Anthony Minghella—using a consumer-level digital system, Apple’s Final Cut Pro (version 3.0). That’s when the revolution went to phase two, opening the door for film students like you to be able to access professional-level editing tools, with those tools ported over from the desktop to the laptop.

The reason this history is relevant is that it provides context and a foundation for you to approach the discipline of editing as a beginner without being intimidated. Gone is the era where there was but one way to edit a motion picture—by cutting and splicing physical pieces of film together manually, frame by frame, sequence by sequence, reel by reel. It was a laborious and physically complicated process back then; editing as a purely creative endeavor was inhibited and a specialized task for real experts, not a discipline open to the masses.

Those days, and the early, equally awkward days of digital editing using physical media, are over. Now you can edit using tools you can afford, with a multitude of options and techniques to enhance your creativity; and, most important, you can do it in a nondestructive way, without disturbing what you had originally or what you have created thus far. You, as film students, have been freed to be creative as editors from the very beginning of your careers.

In Chapter 12 we will discuss in detail just how creative you can be. But first you need to get organized, and to do that, there are new technical and organizational issues to grapple with in the nonlinear world. Editing rooms in the professional arena can often serve as highly complex networked data hubs for entire projects. In fact, it is not unusual to connect several editing systems at once, permitting multiple editors to work during increasingly shortened postproduction cycles. This also allows the director and editor to experiment with more variations in how imagery and sound for particular sequences can be assembled and eventually incorporated into the evolving final cut, which lives on the primary editor’s system. Although things are simpler and more straightforward at your level, there are still core technical and organizational infrastructure issues you need to understand in order to design an efficient editing workflow that will work for your project.