This post completes my two-part series on “The Digital Dilemma 2,” AMPAS’s 135-page report on Indies (independent filmmakers) and the preservation of digital media.

What Indies Say

The report quotes them as stating:

We need archives that make it easy for independent image makers to donate their work. And those archives need to have the wherewithal – finances, storage space and staff – to preserve the work and store it for the very long term…I’m really terrified that once I die, all the work I’ve created will vanish with me.

The work we do becomes part of our collective history, even when it was not initially intended to be.

It’s essential for every filmmaker to pay attention to preserving their work for future generations, as well as for future revenue options.

Challenges

The main hurdles indies face when seeking to preserve their work digitally cost, lack of standards (e.g. what file format should be used), and the absence of established preservation entities and repositories to perform and store the files.

Terms and Concepts

Archivists use the terms “digital preservation,” “digital archiving,” and “data curation” to describe their mandate to preserving digital media which includes workflows beginning with the shoot with perhaps a DIT (digital image technician) on hand and concludes with the storage of the digital data and a set of clear, documented guidelines for its continued preservation. In the report an archivist observed, “Previously, preservation meant that the physical object or item was preserved. With digital preservation, it is the content and not the carrier that must be preserved.”

Conclusion

The report concludes:

The digital dilemma is far from solved. Unless preservation becomes a requirement in planning, budgeting and marketing strategies, it will remain unsolved for independent filmmakers, documentarians and nonprofit audiovisual archives alike. These communities, and the nation’s artistic and cultural heritage, would greatly benefit from a comprehensive, coordinated digital preservation plan for the future.

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In 2007, AMPAS (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and bestower of the Academy awards), published “The Digital Dilemma” about the preservation of studio-made motion pictures. With “The Digital Dilemma 2” a three-year study released in 2011, AMPAS teamed with NDIIPP (the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program) to probe the preservation situation for independent filmmakers (including documentarians) and non-profit audiovisual archives.

Fact: Indies account for 75% of exhibited features and include such recent Best Picture Oscar winners as Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker, and The King’s Speech.

While this short blog cannot possible do justice to this 135-page report, I will try to hit the major points of interest.

The Dilemma

• Most indie filmmakers are occupied with selling their films and moving on to the next project and pay scant attention to archiving.
• If an indie film doesn’t secure major studio distribution, its preservation is uncertain and content loss is most likely.

• Consensus among users is that recorded digital data will not last 30 years. No archivists surveyed by AMPAS trusted storing digital data tapes for that long because data storage hardware and software become obsolete in five to seven years.

Preservation of moving images and recorded audio takes place at the hundreds of archives, libraries, universities, studios, TV stations, and homes around the U.S.

How are these images and sounds being preserved?

1. On film:

The major studios are creating film separation masters which employ the OCN (original camera negative) to generate three B & W (black and white) copies, filtering each one for one of the RGB spectrums. After development, these copies are inert and deemed the most stable for long-term archival, preservation, and restoration purposes. They are vaulted in climate controlled rooms with passive deterioration detectors and straightforward inspection protocols. For indies, this route is financially prohibitive. Also, as digital cinema and cinematography increases, there will be more .DPX and .CIN files to contend with and less photochemical film.

2. On analog tape:

If stored properly in a cool room, this material is relatively simple to preserve and will last for decades, as long as the necessary recording and playback systems are retained.

3. On digital tape:

   Similar method and longevity to analog material.

4. As digital data on digital storage media

As editors well know, much digital tape, film, and analog tape are being converted to digital data in the post process. So dealing with digital data presents a huge challenge. This is due to digital data’s many potential failure points (computer, disk or hard drive, network, software, the actual media itself, etc.) and its short cycle of technical obsolescence (file formats, drive, data readers, etc.).

Digital storage systems range from off shelf, portable hard drives overseen by the filmmaker to complex data centers maintained by archival institutions’ IT departments. Both systems are typically accessed by a desktop computer and necessitate records keeping and tracking via a database software which can be as basic as FileMakerPro or complex as a DAMS (digital asset management system).

Cold storage isn’t enough for digital data which includes files, hard disk drives, DVD, etc. Digital data demands active management on a continuing basis to ensure access to the data. Active data management includes backing up the data to several drives in several locations, routinely verifying (inspecting) the data to make sure it’s pristine, and transcoding it to new formats and drives as they appear to have some staying power.

Summary

The AMPAS report states:

There is no escaping the fact that digital technologies enable independent filmmakers to explore and extend the art form in ways that are simply not possible with motion picture film. The price to be paid for these new capabilities, however, is either the loss of content to digital decay, or accepting the responsibility of working with technology providers to articulate and satisfy industry requirements for the long-term preservation of digital data, achieve satisfactory backwards compatibility and implement standards.

The next post will look at what indie filmmakers say about preservation and give the report’s findings for the future.

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Is editing a growing profession? How does its economic outlook stack up against other professions? Here’s what the U.S. BLS says.

Job Outlook

The BLS expects that the number of film editing jobs to increase by 12% from 2008-2018. This projected rate is slightly greater than average for all careers during this period. However, BLS finds that “competition is keen” as so many people want to enter the profession. Tell us something we didn’t know! Here’s the official table:

Where are the jobs?

Current answer: 75% of us work in television (on nontheatrical projects).

Future answer: In 2010 a Forrester study found that for the first time, people in U.S. divided their screen equally between TV and the computer.  So the ‘Net should bring in more work – webisodes here we (continue to) come!

Let the predictions flow! Let Joy know what you’re seeing and what you think will happen. And good luck to us all!

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Where are the jobs for film and video editors in located in the U.S.? What is the median salary? Do some areas pay higher? Curious, I looked up the latest BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) findings online. Here are the results.

Editor salaries as of May 2010

Summary:

• Mean wage: $68,680 annually
• Lowest 10% mean wage: $25,960 annually
• Highest 10% mean wage: $$111,000+ annually

Here’s the BLS’s wage break down from lowest to highest percentile:

Here’s a map of the top paying areas by state:

In case you had a hard time reading the key, here’s a summary box of the five top paying states:

Here are the top paying areas by metropolitan area:

admin History/research, Jobs

To the left is a first pass at a one page, job aid on the history of editing. It comes by way of Gordon Burkell who runs the informative, solidly recommended Art of the Guillotine website.  Burkell desgined this “infographic” as he dubs it, with Nina from Nina’s EDL in Toronto, the home base of the website.

I think it’s a good start but to my Hollywood American mind, it’s missing more periods and movies. For instance, the Modern, MTV style of cutting which germinated in the years before 1981 and the birth of MTV, is barely touched on.

Also, where is the technology? From silver screen to television tube to computer screen and from scissors to Moviola to flatbed to video editing, to digital editing: Technological developments have played a huge role in the evolution of editing.

A good history of editing has yet to be written. Two sources I can think of off the top of my head for editing history are Wendy Apple’s excellent documentary The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Cinema Editing and Gerald Mast’s A Short History of the Movies, ninth edition.

But kudos to Gordon and Nina for getting the reel winding!

admin Editing practices, Editor’s role, History/research, Technical & process

Susan Perla, CBS news editor, reported on her 16-hour days following the obliteration of the World Trade Center:

“The images that I could not air were pretty awful. I do think about some of the footage and it disturbs me. I hope that as I work with people, I can bring humanness to any aspect of a news story. There are times when I feel we are vultures, looking for scraps. Then there are times when I finish up and look at the work and it makes me proud of a day’s work or a package cut well. It might make an impact or force someone to think about an issue.”

On the tenth anniversary of this world-changing event, I think we’re all re-viewing the burning images, commemorating the lost lives, and contemplating what they all mean.

At first we didn’t know what to call it. Nine-one-one?  Nine-eleven? The latter stuck, too close to the chain store in nomenclature for me. We learned many more words: Kabul, Al Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, Iraq, Afghanistan, IED, Freedom Fries, Abu Ghraib, Blackwater, rendition, waterboarding, insurgency, terrorism. And those were just a few of the words applied to horrors beyond our imagination aboard. At home, we learned the tragedy of words such as foreclosure, red, blue, PTSD, recession, unemployment, homelessness.

I’ve been reading articles, pondering the last ten years, and like most of us, trying to make sense of it. I am saddened and sickened by our nation’s inability to heal itself and its increasing the hatred of our country abroad with our aggressive, astronomically costly wars. An article in the September 12 issue of The New Yorker focuses on the fracturing of our country over the wars, the economy, the meaning of 9/11 itself, and who the enemy and what the real problems and issues are. The article contends that we now lack a common narrative of the last ten year’s worth of events, due to the divergence of our leaders and the callous blindness of the Bush administration.

I don’t usually write politically here but after ten years, with our country and countrymen and women, especially returning soldiers, in terrible, ever-worsening shape, I am sick and sad. Perhaps as editors – as writers with sound and image – we can, like Susan Perla remarked, bring humanness to our projects. God knows the world needs it.

To end on a contemplative, memorial note, here’s a video doc that consists of an interview with the architect of the water memorial in NYC to those who died in the towers which opens to the public 9/12/2011. I see the water as leading to the void. Please, let’s reach out across the divides and firmly put our nation on a path that is true to all those founding beliefs of liberty, happiness, equality, etc. that we so cherish.

admin Editor’s role, History/research, Television

Following up on the last post on constructing reality, here’s a terrific piece from the UK. Journalist and comedy writer Charlie Brooker hosts “Screenswipe” a weekly broadcast where he looks at TV subjects from an incisively knowing and humorous perch. In the video on editing reality TV below, toward the end he also unwittingly provides a modern proof of the Kuleshov experiment. If you don’t know about Kuleshov, read after the video and view the video of the actual experiment.

Kuleshov and the Juxtaposition of Shots

Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov was a scientist and founder of the Moscow School of Cinema in 1919, the world’s oldest film school. Russian cinema came of age with the 1917 revolution.  Steeped in Marxism and supported by the state, it was also influenced by the plight of the economy after the revolution which caused a scarcity of film and film equipment. Kuleshov made use of leftover film of a popular White Russian actor who had fled the revolution for France to put together a scene and create the basis of his famous experiment.

He began the scene with a shot of a bowl of soup. To it, he spliced a close-up of the actor.  Then he added a shot of a young girl. Again he cut to a close-up the actor. The last edit he made was to a dead woman in a coffin before ending on the actor. Here’s what purports to be the video of Kuleshov’s experiment; the girl is a woman so this is suspicious but it gives you the idea:

Viewer reaction to Kuleshov’s scene

The audience made a connection between each pair of cuts.  They told Kuleshov that the man was hungry when he saw the soup. They believed that the girl was his daughter whom he was delighted to see and that the woman in the casket was his mother for whom he was grieving.

The trick

Kuleshov filmed the shots of the soup, girl, and dead woman at different times in different locations. For the cutaways of the actor he reproduced the same shot for the same length several times. The experiment proved what we all know now; that shots edited together affect each other: The audience makes a connection across the joining of the shots and read different emotions into each reaction shot of the actor even though he was reacting exactly the same way each time. The Soviets aligned this effect of the juxtaposition of shots with Marxist theory and built their cinematic theories on it. Since then this juxtaposing has received a host of other names such as collision editing and relational editing.

What are your experiences juxtaposing shots?

admin Editing practices, Editor’s role, History/research, Television

I had always heard about this movie and the Lubitsch touch and finally caught it in on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, do it! If you have, re-view it. This 1932 movie shows what an ingenious director can do in the face of technical challenges. It was shot at the beginning of the “talkie” era when sound recording equipment famously “chained the camera” because it was too bulky and noisy to move.

Director Ernst Lubitsch had a superb cast and script (written by Samson Raphaelson) and knew what to do with the camera. In the dialogue scenes it stays put but he cuts away frequently to break things up, shoots from all angles, and cheat actions. Watch this seminal scene below. It not only sets up the characters but engages us so much that when it cuts away to the door and then the curtain, we don’t notice that Gaston Montescu (played by Herbert Marshall) doesn’t close the curtains – they close themselves – after which he re-enters the scene to be with Lily (the extremely talented Miriam Hopkins).

Natural born thieves, natural editing Modern editing

The editing for this 83 minute movie is as sly and sophisticated as its amoral characters, professional thieves by trade and choice. And even sexier. The cutting intimates intimacy – Gaston sleeping with two gorgeous women – which scored its being banned after three years under the Hays code and not seen in the U.S. from 1935-1968. Even better, the women and the men, both rich and scheming, are not stereotyped, but seen as equals in their sexual desires, silliness, and attitudes toward money.

Wealthy widow and perfume company owner Mariette Colet (Kay Francis, terrific as always) employs the thieves.

Trouble in Paradise is superb study in editing for its comic timing and economy of edits. It is no stale, slow moving classic movie. Although the camera pauses for the dialogue scenes, they are well-written and timed and Lubitsch kept the camera or actors active when words don’t need to be recorded. The director also employs sound effects along with deft picture cuts to move the movie along.

As with the best of comedy, the cuts and the plot points they move to counter to expectations. The opening scene counters clichés by showing a Venice gondolier poling a bag of garbage along the canal. Nothings is conventional about this movie as it counters are expectations time and time again. Lubitsch also creates some clever scene transitions. One uses a series of deco clocks to show the advance of an affair; another has the Eiffel tower broadcasting frequency waves like the RKO logo to signal the thief couple’s move from Venice to Paris.

We enjoy spending time with this couple as do the uber-rich people they swindle, though we know we’d have to watch our wallets and jewelry around them I also enjoyed seeing character actor Edward Everett Horton – younger and rounder than I’d ever seen him before.

Finally, this movie sets a high standard for romance, comedy, and editing because goes beyond  the glitzy world of its characters to look at how to accept of life in the face of the sometimes gritty, soul-challenging business of living it.

Rival suitors played by Charles Ruggles (l) and Edward Everett Horton (r).

Lubitsch himself

Like many Jewish director-producers in the 1920’s, Lubitsch escaped the hard lives of his parents in Europe and crossed over to the U.S. to create Hollywood and its movies. For a premiere look at this subject, check out Neal Gabler’s award-winning, highly readable book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.)

The Lubitsch touch

Many of have tried to describe the spin Lubitsch puts on his movies. One of them, director Billy Wilder, another Jewish European escapee, had a sign in his studio office that said, “How would Lubitsch do it?” Many more have appreciated the Lubitsch touch, as I suggest you do, simply by experiencing his films (filmography below). Biographer Scott Eyeman, expresses the touch this way:

With few exceptions Lubitsch’s movies take place neither in Europe nor America but in Lubitschland, a place of metaphor, benign grace, rueful wisdom…To the unsophisticated eye, Lubitsch’s work can appear dated, simply because his characters belong to a world of formal sexual protocol. But his approach to film, to comedy, and to life was not so much ahead of its time as it was singular, and totally out of any time.

The Lubitsch touch apparently extended to women in his personal life. He died at 55 in 1947 of a heart attack, purportedly while entwined with an aspiring actress. How’s that for a Lubitsch ending?

Lubitsch Filmography (U.S.)

1940′s
The Shop Around the Corner (also prod.) 1940  Remade in 1998 as You’ve got Mail.
That Uncertain Feeling (also prod.) 1941
To Be or Not to Be (also co-prod. co-story) 1942
Heaven Can Wait (also prod.) 1943
A Royal Scandal (prod. only) 1945
Cluny Brown (also prod.) 1946
That Lady in Ermine (completed by Otto Preminger post humous) 1948

1930′s
Paramount on Parade (co-dir. with 10 others) 1930
Monte Carlo 1930
The Smiling Lieutenant (also co-sc.) 1931
The Man I Killed/Broken Lullaby 1932
One Hour With You 1932
Trouble in Paradise (also prod.) 1932
Design for Living 1933
The Merry Widow 1934
Desire (prod. only) 1936
Angel (also prod.) 1937
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (also prod.) 1938
Ninotchka 1939

1920′s
Rosita 1923
The Marriage Circle 1924
Three Women (also co-story) 1924
Forbidden Paradise 1924
Kiss Me Again 1925
Lady Windermere’s Fan 1925
So This Is Paris 1926
The Student Prince/The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg 1927
The Patriot 1928
Eternal Love 1929
The Love Parade 1929

admin Editing practices, Editor’s role, History/research, Joy goes to the movies, Sound & music editing

The other day I had a couple of memory flashes:

1) Seeing a phalanx of abandoned CMX 6000s in the storage room of a post facility, all at attention, as if they were waiting for Wallye to salvage them.

2) Walking past a line of heaped up Moviolas and parts pushed up against a wall in the hallway of a former lab, looking like a wayside Guernica memorial.

I found myself ruminating on all the editing systems I’ve worked on over the years, from film to video to digital. What do you remember?

Below is a partial list of obsolescent editing tools. Granted, not all of these are strictly computers but most had some computer or digital elements. RIP. We remember many of you fondly:

Lucasfilm created only 30 EditDroids, an NLE which stored A & V on laserdiscs. EditDroid roamed the galaxy before the term “media” was used and external hard drives were invented.

admin Editing & life, History/research, Technical & process

In my Web meanderings this week, I came across a site that gives a good ride through Hollywood movies. www.filmsite.org honors filmmakers of all types (actors, editors, directors, etc.) as well as all genres (horror, comedy, sci-fi etc.) Written and edited by Senior Editor and Film Historian Tim Dirks who launched the site in 1998 it now runs it under the auspices of American Movie Classics (AMC). Dirks does a great job detailing each movie for plot and whatever subject he’s concentrating on so it’s worth dropping by the site periodically. I enjoyed re-viewing old movies and learning about ones that I never got around to seeing.

Editing example

Here’s an edited version of Dirks’ intro to a 10-part series surveying editing sequences with interjections from moi.

This survey of the best examples of feature film editing stretches back to the earliest silent films. The very first films were called actualities – they were short, single-shot films with a stationary camera, viewing a scene (a train pulling into a station, workers leaving a factory, etc.), without editing of any kind.

Dirks lists a series of classic scenes which exhibit masterful editing:

• Film-within-a-film dream sequence of Sherlock, Jr. (1924) [As an editor and former projectionist I’ve always loved this film and cheer his choice.]
• Chariot race in Ben-Hur (1959)
• Crop-dusting chase sequence in North by Northwest (1959)
• Shower scene in Psycho (1960)
• Phone booth bird attack scene in The Birds (1963)
• “Ballet of blood” ambush in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
• Subway chase scene in The French Connection (1971)
• Dawn workout sequence in Rocky (1976)
• Death Star battle scene in Star Wars (1977)
• Rolling boulder sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

Example from Part 10 of Dirks’ series on best film editing sequences

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

Ellipses indicate where I have edited Dirks’ commentary.

This unforgettable anti-drug cautionary tale was composed of many inventive, rapid and stylistic jump-cuts (called a “hip-hop” montage), split-screens, extreme close-ups, assaultive audio, and distorted images in the unrated (originally rated NC-17) film’s tense and final 15 minutes (assembled together in a montage) to illustrate how lives were utterly shattered and affected by diet pills and stronger drugs…

…. the independent film had about three times the number of edits (2,000) when compared to an average film (600+), especially during the ending when each of the shots were shortened and then presented in an intensely-rapid pace along with a memorable soundtrack.

This is a film I missed and his commentary definitely makes me want to see it. My only quibble is that once again, when talking about the editing, Dirks, like so many other film commentators, fails to mention the editor. He lists only the director, Darren Aronofsky, overlooking Jay Rabinowitz, the editor.

Other areas of commentary

Here are some other subjects Dirks explores. Click to go to any of them.

admin Editing practices, Editor’s role, History/research, Joy goes to the movies