Focus on Editing: Jay Ankeney

The Legacy of Linear

Hot enough for ya? Let's chill with a bit of post-production perspective. Last month began the 19th year of this column's run in these pages and next month will be the 20th anniversary of TV Technology itself. So since our September edition will be reviewing the output of this column's own particular timeline, let's preface that retrospective by talking with some of our fellow editors about the most significant watershed over the past two decades affecting the craft of editing itself: the huge paradigm change from linear to nonlinear editing.

As Tom Ohanian, famed co-inventor of the Avid Media Composer, reminds us, this is actually a procedural evolution unprecedented in its impact.

"We need to remember that the concept of linear editing goes back over a century to the beginning of the silent film era," this multiple Emmy and Academy Award winner for technical achievements reminds us. "Yet in less than 10 years since the introduction of computerized nonlinear editing, the time-honored process of sequentially spooling shots from film reels in an edit bay has almost completely disappeared. And with the advent of uncompressed online finishing systems for video, we are seeing digital disk-based NLE technology doing the same thing to the process of mastering from linear video tape in even less time."

INSTANT GRATIFICATION

Tom, now vice president of digital media technology company DMOD, believes this expectation of real-time instant gratification with nonlinear editing has fundamentally changed our creative approach to our artform. "Anyone who learned to set up a multiple VTR tape-based edit suite with multiple M/Es on a standalone switcher had a different relationship to the technology than some of today's younger editors who have only experienced a desktop NLE," he reflects. "But today it is wonderful that you can get the same creative capabilities from a disk-based system costing less than $50,000 that once would have required an investment well into six figures. Still, the basis of my approach to editing, and the origins of the whole Avid approach to digital post production, came in a large part from my background as a linear editor."

Paul Mitton is a veteran freelance editor whose experiences ranging back to the mid-1980s include linear A/B-roll editing using a combination of 3/4-inch U-Matic and 2-inch Quad tape at WTGL-TV in Orlando, Fla. Today, straddling both sides of the linear/nonlinear pond, he is training on an Editware DPE linear edit system as prelude to an editing position at one of the biggest cable services whose news arm still uses tape-based edit systems. Paul is also learning Pinnacle's Edition and Liquid editing software and he is producing his own video travel series, "Itchy Feet."

Having begun spinning cumbersome reels of tape, these days Paul is especially taking advantage of the portable possibilities of today's in-the-field NLE capabilities while cutting a video called "Just Another Pilot" directed by Steve Stafford and starring Harrison Ford. As he describes it, "I'm running around the countryside with a laptop, an external FireWire drive, and a DVD burner and I have everything I possibly need to post-produce a major production all in one carry-on case. It gives me the equivalent of a $500,000 linear edit suite sitting in my laptop. If I'd had this kind of gear available to me 20 years ago," Paul laughs, "I might be where Spielberg is today."

NLE-LAND

Sam Day, the editor in the Creative Services department of WKGR-TV in Mobile, Ala., cut his teeth on a Grass Valley linear edit controller in the early '90s before he moved to nonlinear editing on a Jaleo system, one of the earliest uncompressed NLEs. "My technical background gave me a comfort level around the linear technology that enabled me to tackle disk-based editing more easily than other novices," Sam recalls.

Today Sam is working on a Leitch dpsVelocityQ system, but believes his tape-cutting experience is still paying off. "When I moved into 'NLE Land,' I ended up doing a lot of promos for the station," he says, "and I'm sure that if I had not had that experience cutting tape I might not have been given the shot. There is nothing like the learning experience of staring at a data monitor full of timecode in a room filled with linear equipment -- a lot of the younger editors wouldn't understand where to begin with that. For example, interns ask me why we bother to lay down bars and tone at the head of a tape. They kind of figure that anything coming out of a computer has a reference of its own so they get totally lost if the video is out of whack. Still, the cheaper desktop NLEs are opening editing opportunities to a lot more people, so there is a good side to it also."

Although Charlie Mundell is currently Senior Technical Director at Univision, which owns KMEX-TV in Los Angeles, he remembers fondly his first job out of Eastern New Mexico University -- at the Fox affiliate KABB-TV in San Antonio running a VPE-131 tape editor with a GVG 200 switcher and DMP-700 DVE. Since the station offered free edit time to its advertisers, Charlie encountered the gamut of clients. "You could design your own look in the switcher without pre-built effects," he tells us, "and even today since I know the original Grass Valley Group "P.E.G.S." commands (Programmed Motion, E-Mem, GPI and Serial Trigger) for the GVG Kalypso in our news control room I can make that switcher perform in a way that someone without a linear editing heritage wouldn't know about."

CUT-UPS

Finally, just to show how far we've come, there's a coda to my June column about the history of linear editing technology. While describing the almost unbelievable process of manually cutting 2-inch quad tape with a Smith guillotine splicer, I speculated that the last time a physical cut on tape was broadcast may have been in 1978. Since then, editor David Crosthwait has told me that physical cuts were still being done several years later.

"I can personally submit that I physically spliced 'The Tonight Show' for-air as late as 1980 or 1981," David said. "The crew had to make an east coast feed within an hour and a half of the live-to-tape recording on Ampex VR 2000Bs," David confirms. "Since the show was at that time 90 minutes long, there was no way to do any major pull-ups except by physical splicing."

However, since then Keith Graham, who is currently working in marketing for Sony Broadcast and Professional Services, has trumped that date by two years based on an experience he had as a young editor for Thames TV in London. In late-1983, Keith was on a remote shoot recording England's hit "Disco Music Awards Show" for time-delayed playback the same evening. With only 20 minutes before airtime, he was rewinding the tape on the truck's Ampex VR-1200C to spot check it when the quad VTR threw a loop and neatly sliced through the tape.

Keith rushed to the workshop and grabbed a Smith splicer. Luckily, this was the more advanced design that held the tape in a vacuum while a rotating head detected the location of the control track pulse. "I laid down the tape and used a crank to move the tape so I could find the cut point by aligning the rising edge of the pulse with a graticule before bringing down the blade," Keith said. "Luckily I only lost about 1.5 seconds of material and it didn't fall in the middle of a musical number so it was hardly noticeable."

Desktop digicutters should compare that with slapping a couple of files on the timeline of an NLE. And if you consider that the eight-field sequence of the Thames TV 25 fps PAL recording format meant Keith had only six possible edit points per second in which to make the splice without a major video glitch, you can appreciate the level of arcane technology that today's nonlinear digital disk edit systems have left far behind. Still, editors of today and yesterday are inherently problem solvers and whether clicking on a clip bin or dragging nitrate out of a trim bag, the main continuity is our determination not to let the rapid evolution of the tools of our trade get in the way of finding creative solutions.

Jay Ankeney is a free -- lance editor and post -- production consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him at 220 39th St. (upper), Manhattan Beach, CA 90266 or at JayAnkeney@aol.com