It was a dream job. Joel and Ethan Cohen were coming to town to do their next feature. They needed an editor to synch dailies and screen for them. Eventually all the footage would go back to New York for editing. "Great, I’ll get to do some feature film work on the Avid," I thought to myself.

NOT! Joel and Ethan are some of the last Producer/Directors who still edit on film. A Kem? Me? I hadn’t seen one in years! A film bench? You’re kidding, right? Nope. They even edit on an upright Movieola, circa 1930 (see photo).

What do I do now? Turn down the job?  I felt a little nervous about accepting the job.  Having spent a number of years in New York editing film for Maysles, I thought, it would all come back to me. Well it did, and things went pretty smoothly.

The point of this story is that editing hasn't change that much. Technology has changed. Nonlinear editing has been around as long as film has existed. Film editors have always edited in a nonlinear style. That’s what Ken Burns meant when he said he was a Filmmaker. In fact, most documentary films were edited on film until the early 1990s because the method of film editing, however ancient, was nonlinear!  Maysles, Pennebacker and Burns all edited on film until the advent of Avid and D-Vision (now Discreet Logic’s edit*) in the early 1990s.  Can you imagine editing a one-hour documentary with 100,000 feet of raw material on video, then wanting to change a shot? The whole show would have to be reassembled. I’m sure people worked that way. Luckily, I never had to.

The Movieola, Steenbeck and Kem were all nonlinear editing machines. Only when Ampex introduced electronic videotape for television did editors have to start thinking in linear terms. Videotape editors had to connect the dots. In other words, they had to edit from beginning to end of program. Film editors never had to think linearly because they could cut and paste wherever they wanted.

nonlinear simply means not having to start at the beginning and not having to re-edit the whole show because you’ve changed one shot. The possibility of inserting shots without re-assembling the show has always existed for film editors. I remember editing commercials on film. We always started at the end because we knew how long the product shot had to be. Then we would usually work our way towards the beginning. The challenge for editors today is to think nonlinearly. Try editing the middle or the end of a piece before you edit the opening. It’ll change your perspective.

Why not? nonlinear is a way of thinking rather than mechanics or electronics. While the technology has made it easier and faster to edit, (i.e. I can undo an edit in Avid a lot faster than I can redo a splice), the creative process still involves relationships between shots and evaluating shot quality and timing. Technology can only go so far in creating a distinctive show. For me technology has come full circle. Like the Moviolas, Kems & Steenbecks of the past, The Avids, Media 100s & edit* systems allow me to think nonlinearly when editing.

Ironically, I know editors who still work linearly, even on digital machines. In fact, I would be willing to bet that most editors who work on digital machines begin with the first shot! Why? There’s no good reason for it -- except that’s how they were trained. Most editors were trained to think linearly. Remember Joel and Ethan Cohen: They're editing nonlinear-style on a machine that is at least 60 to 70 years old.

Lastly, film editors still find it difficult to edit on a small screen. We’re used to seeing our film edits projected every night on the large screen. In Asia, when Avid first arrived, we would duplicate our cuts onto 35mm film so it could be projected every evening. The big screen is a different viewing experience than the small screen. However, that’s a different article for a different time.