Editor’s signature?

[Michael Mcintyre]

I don’t but we did receive a network sizzle reel that had a 2-frame sync pop that had a frame of old film leader and ‘Edit With Steve’ and his email where PICTURE START went. That was kinda cool.

Interesting notion of an editorial easter egg though. Those would prove hard to sneak past some of my clients though.

[Scott Sheriff]

This kind of thing used to be pretty common in broadcast back in the 80’s. We used to put stuff in the background in shots, or write stuff in the backgrounds of graphics. You could see it in the booth if you knew where to look, but by the time stuff got dubbed for air, and got to the tube it was very hard to see. This type of thing started to fall out of favor once the quality of the video chain to the viewer made these things more obvious.

Scott Sheriff
Director
SST Digital Media
https://www.sstdigitalmedia.com

[Adam Taylor]

just for a laugh i once got the gallery to drop in a “Library Pictures” caption even though the shots were brand new that day….the story? all about a library!!

Tickled me, but no-one else noticed.
sadly, you just don’t get that kind of opportunity everyday!.

adam

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk

[Mark Suszko]

Back in the 80’s, all the big editing shops in Chicago fought to out-do each other with creatively composed slates and countdowns, elements the TV viewers would never see, only tape engineers and ad execs would. The editors and compositors were making slates and counts more interesting and technically demanding than some of the actual spot work, just as a sort of “calling card”.

[Grinner Hester]

I’m sure a I have my habbits but I’d never intentionally force any vibe on a project for the sake of ego.

[Jason Byfield]

I guess I was thinking more like elements in an edit vs. an overall feel.

This may apply better to one of the compositing forums where projects tend to incorporate many different elements that the viewer only gets a brief glance at.

[Jason Byfield]

Nice. Be it an editor to spend countless hours perfecting something the public will never see. 🙂

[Mark Suszko]

Well, along those lines, there could be such things as the editor’s default choice of dissolve rate, his or her favorite font choices and colors, how they place a lower third and the timing, how they tend to frame things up… As far as cutting, we are usually trying to make the cuts as invisible and natural-seeming as possible, but I guess one editor tends more than another to favor more L-cuts over straight “Dragnet”-type smash cuts when covering dialog, or more close-ups over wider coverage, more or less reaction shots, or tighter, faster pacing over longer shot durations. Things like that. Over time, that sort of a style profile could emerge, though of course every job has different needs and requirements that might overrule those natural tendencies.

As far as the video equivalent of hiding a personal “Nina” in the frame like a video Hershfeld, I hadn’t come across anything like that except for some movies that had been transferred to VHS where they stuck a very tiny font far out of both title and action safe, right at the edge of the vertical interval line. You could only see it if you adjusted your vertical hold on a regular tv set. I think it was done as an anti-piracy measure, to be able to identify where a copy had been stolen from, but anybody with a switcher or DVE could have masked it out during their dubs, so it wasn’t very effective for that. I suppose if you were that sort of person who needed to plant a hidden easter egg in your work, you could hide a personal message as part of the user bits in the time code, but that would be *highly* obscure. Only the Art Bell crowd would find it, much less think to look for it.

We had a high school intern who added some one-frame subliminal cuts to a project as a goof because she had just read up on them in her text books. But it wasn’t for anything serious.

[Fred Jodry]

There`s of course the broad not individual signatures of the vits (vertical interval test signal) crowd starting at RCA/ NBC and later the vitc (vertical interval time code) and closed captioning ABC crowds. These top of the picture lines and blinking ants appear brightly at or near the top of the tube of every single black and white and color tv in my house.

[Dan Archer]

I have only seen this twice in almost 20 years. One editor I used to work with tried for a while to make all his drop shadows go up and to the left??????? I dont think it lasted very long. Now I did knew of one guy thsat refused to do blinking text, although thats not a seen thing. So there ya go. I cant spell worth a damn, does that count?

A cut is a cut & a dissolve is a disolve, and not just anybody with a system is a pro.