The future of editing?

[Grinner Hester]

I find it odd that an Applebee’s waitress has been touch screening for 5 years but video editors still don’t. I even have clients try to touch icons. I think thats just to smudge my screen tho.
to me, the keyboard, monotor and mousing contraption of any sort otta be one big unit.

[Mark]

Bottom line, you still need to know how to cut to make one of those things work…

It’s not so much the tools, as the artist behind them.

I like to work with a Wacom tablet, I hate the mouse….would I like a touch screen ??? Possibly, it would at least give me some exercise rather than sitting on my whilst editing. When I used to edit on tape, people used to laugh because I used to edit standing up. I was way more comfortable. Because I share this room with other editors I have a plain edit desk, but I would love to have everything set up on a drafting table so that I could edit standing up. A flat panel touch screen would enable me to do this.

Mark

[Ashley M. kirchner]

The next question is size and cost. Flatpanels themselves aren’t as expensive anymore, however touch screens aren’t your every day purchase and their prices are, in my opinion, still a bit high. At least one of usable size, not some little 14″ they use in retail stores. EloTouch (www.elotouch.com) makes some nice, large ones. Unfortunately they don’t list prices for stuff over 17″ (which is listed at $829). MagicTouch (www.magictouch.com) also makes a variety of (IR) products that might work. I just don’t see any of these systems as a viable solution for your every day road warrior editor, but more for a large outfit that can afford the high cost of one of these setups.

[Mike Cohen]

The best interface is, of course, the human brain. I can close my eyes and envision my movie playing out in my head, often before I even shoot it.

Once in the editing mode, I know I have a shot of a particular action from a particular actor from floor level, but I did not log the footage so I need to manually scan the bins to visually find the clip. What if the computer was smart enough to hear me say “find a clip of Bob throwing a pencil from table level…etc” and the computer knows which character is Bob, knows what a pencil is, and has a basic understanding of camera angles, and it presents me with my clip, or a few options.

Supposedly the government has face recognition technology, so I think the future will be computers identifying the contents of the video, so we can interact verbally, like you would with a film assistant back in the moviola days.

As for a visual interface, it should take the customizable interfaces of Premiere Pro and FCP and let you make any kind of window configuration you want, that is, make any kind of interface you want. Why conform to a standard designed by AVID, when you can create something which works the way you work.

Mouse, pen, touch screen? Every few years a new device is invented. Some are great, some are silly. The hand-computer interface will change over time. An eye-tracking screen might work.

Droidmakers was a great book. Everyone should read it!

Mike