[Jeff Markgraf]

Simon –

I agree with most of your points. One question, though.

If I understand correctly, you believe multicam shooting and NLEs are the major factors contributing to the loss (for want of a better word) of good staging and composition, ala Spielberg, et al. I wonder if the rise of multicam and the modern style of over-cutting are the symptoms, rather than the cause. Perhaps TV and lower-budget, faster-turnaround movies have created more pressure to save time and money, resulting in more frequent (and unnecessary) use of multiple cameras. Certainly the time pressures inherent in series television tend to steer a director away form inventive staging and into basic coverage. Add into this the seemingly unstoppable devaluing of history and craft (in all disciplines), and you have the current state of most cinema and virtually all television.

Thoughts?

[Jeff Markgraf]

OK, let’s try again.

– General discussion of cutting style, specifically choosing not to cut as often vs. today’s over-cut style.
– Bill suggests editing is about compressing and directing focus and pacing.
– Several say “hey, we’re talking films here, not industrials.”
– I chime in with points on both “sides” of the issue, expressing a preference for a slower pace, but pointing out that badly shot or staged material must sometimes be “fixed” in the editing.

Perhaps in response to that, or a responding the the discussion in general, you said, “In my capacity as an editor I have always looked at my job as not to fix what happened in production, but to enhance what happened in production.” Your choice of “not xxx, but yyy” implies an either/or viewpoint. Not “fix,” but “enhance.”

So let’s take “luck” out of the discussion. Your post implies you don’t have to “fix” material you work on. I point out that I often do have to “fix.” I wondered how you’re able to avoid the kind of jobs where fixing is needed. Since your response only dealt with dismissing luck as a “thing,” I asked for clarification.

Now we get to the “I have no idea what you’re taking about” part. I attempted to rephrase and clarify my question.

Your response: “Luck is nonsense. It is an illusion. Luck is not a thing in the real world. You are either working for the success of your current project or you are not. I am really not sure what you are doing.”

So I’m still trying to understand your initial post, setting up a choice between “fix it” or “enhance it.” I’m asking how you have apparently been able to work only on projects that require only enhancing and no fixing. I am further asking if, perhaps, fixing is actually part of enhancing. In which case, the either/or of your initial post may not accurately describe the work you or I do.

Let’s just agree to ignore the insult implicit in “I am really not sure what you are doing.”

[Jeff Markgraf]

Then I’ll try to spell it out.

In response to a post I made about often having to fix material in the editing, you said, “I have always looked at my job as not to fix what happened in production, but to enhance what happened in production.”

I replied that I thought you were lucky not to have had to deal with (paraphrasing here) “fixing it in post.”

You replied, “Luck has nothing whatever to do with it.”

So I wanted to clarify the ways in which your experience has been different from mine, and specifically why luck was not a factor. I further wondered if perhaps, “enhancing what happened in production” might automatically include sometimes “fixing” poorly shot or staged footage.

Hope that helps.

[Jeff Markgraf]

Well…

“usually when the story is bad and too short for a feature and both antagonist and protagonist are complete jerks the chance of blocking and staging errors for some reason increases.”

I would say he is suggesting that films in which both the protagonist and antagonist are unpleasant people (“jerks”) one tends to find more poor blocking and staging than in films with non-“jerk” main characters. Add in a bad story and a less-than-feature length running time, and the chances for bad blocking and accompanying odd editing choices increases.

Not sure I agree with the premise, but it seems pretty clear what Michael is saying here.

[Jeff Markgraf]

So, to clarify –

As an editor, you’ve never had to fix a poorly shot or staged scene? And there was no luck involved, I guess, because you’ve been able to choose films that had no poorly shot or staged scenes? Or you’ve edited films with poorly shot for staged scenes but did not fix them? Again, not a matter of luck.

Or perhaps fixing a poorly shot or staged scene is part and parcel of editing to enhancing a scene. In which case, we’d be saying essentially the same thing.

[Jeff Markgraf]

Timothy –

I wish I were as lucky as you seem to have been. Many of the editing jobs I have been hired for did require me to fix much of what happened in production. I would hazard a guess that more feature editing is about fixing than most people would suspect. But I grant others have had other experiences.

BTW, if I didn’t mention it before – don’t get me started on TV! 😉

[Jeff Markgraf]

As usual, I think there’s a middle ground. Or maybe several different grounds.

To Bill and Simon’s points:

Well, yes, for some situations, editing is about compressing things. If we’re discussing corporate or informational or promo or other of these kinds of projects, then the demands of editing are similar. Compression of time and/or ideas is really useful and important. The audience and the needs of the project require a certain technique. Nothing wrong with that. Some industrial/corporate pieces from years ago seem painfully slow. Because they were. “Modern” editing techniques can certainly improve upon these kids of pieces, as long as the “form” doesn’t get in the way of the “function.”

“Art” pieces, for want of a better encompassing term, have different needs. I would completely agree that modern editing styles kind of suck and do more harm than good for most newer movies. And don’t even get me started on TV! But in order to realize a more considered editing approach, the material has to support that approach. What passes for direction today often can only be made watchable through aggressive editing. And that’s a real shame.

Editing does not live separately from direction, which does not live separately from writing, and so on down the line. I’d LOVE to cut something staged and blocked and shot by a Spielberg or Scorcese or DePalma or Siegel or Polanski. Bay, Abrams, Disney’s hack-of-the-week, not so much. Yet some of the masters conceive and shoot sequences designed for aggressive editing, yay for cuts!

I think it’s also relevant to consider modern audiences and modern tastes. I happen to like British films from mid-last century. But they sure are slow, even ponderous, to a modern audience. (Relatively) modern films like Barry Lyndon, Somewhere in Time, Days of Heaven…they’re not to everyone’s taste. But then I kinda like popcorn movies like Transporter. Even the dreadfully over-shot and wildly over-cut Bourne films have their own charm. I can’t imagine Bourne cut like Casablanca. Or Lawrence of Arabia cut like Pretty Woman. Why would anyone do that?

[Jeff Markgraf]

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[Jeff Markgraf]

Tim-

Just to be clear, I used those words specifically and separately. In one case, inertia. In another case, inertia and fear. I haven’t conflated inertia and fear. They’re two different things.

Also, inertia is not to be confused with caution or with being methodical.

I suggested inertia is a primary factor in NBC’s staying with Avid. It’s not about not choosing FCPX. It’s about them not choosing anything. I doubt anyone there was much thought given to the new NLE wars. But I don’t think it’s a case of choosing to stay with Avid. I don’t think there’s any “choosing” going on at all. Inertia. Sorta moving forward but not by active choice.

In ABC’s case, I quite specifically added fear into the mix, along with inertia. They needed to choose a new NLE. In many respects, choosing Premiere was the path of least resistance – it is, by general consensus, the most FCP Legacy-like. Easy choice. Not really much of a choice. Inertia. The fear is from a group of people there who are incredibly resistant to change, to the point of fearing it. They were late to give up CMX, late to incorporate Avid for finishing, etc. FCP was mostly about money, and partly a thumb in Avid’s eye. X would have been a perfectly good choice. There’s no legacy infrastructure (as there often is with Avid). Premiere is just less scary.

So I think you’re constructing a bit of a straw man argument here. No thoughtful person on this board has seriously suggested that anyone who doesn’t get with the X program is afraid of it. That’s a dumb trope that’s demonstrably not true. Even so, there are some who are, in fact, afraid of X. Even hostile toward it. I know a few. It’s hard to have a serious conversation with them.

Fortunately, many more of the naysayers I’ve come across are merely ignorant of X. I’ve got a couple of managers at the network-that-must-not-be-named’s digital group who have been standing over my shoulder, watching with delight as I work with X on some important projects that have until now been done strictly on Avid. It was like pulling teeth to get them to let me use X. Now they can’t wait to learn it themselves. Yet a couple of the Avid guys from net promo still like to come up and pontificate on how unsuitable X is for professional work. Not that they’ve used it. They just know. I’m inclined to call fear masquerading as arrogance. And I’m not casually impugning these guys’ motives – I’m quite intentionally calling BS on them and their motives. Nothing casual about it. And so it goes…

I could write more, but I have to leave something in reserve in case Aindreas pops back in. 😉

[Jeff Markgraf]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “I just wonder if the pre-requisite was a relationship that allowed primary scene handling outside the editor.”

My impression from reading/hearing the directors & editor is that they liked X and wanted to use it. They then jumped through a lot of hoops to get the studio to sign off on its use. I don’t get the sense that the software was chosen specifically to facilitate the directors’ being able to edit. Indeed, Ficarro (sp?) describes himself in this very thread as having been a “workaday editor” in a past life. Meaning he surely knows Avid well enough to edit anything he wants to. He just likes X and wanted to use it on his movie.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “cheap crack about Soho and commercial rooms”

Been there, done that on many a commercial edit. Surely a little level of hell that Dante forgot about. If I could have thrown them all out, I would have. It wasn’t collaboration, it was second-guessing and back-stabbing and ass-covering of the worst sort. I doubt editing Focus was anything like that.

[Aindreas Gallagher] “how many editors would be willing to swallow what is the equivalent of a software engineer taking over their screen to direct their tool?”

See, here’s where I think you’re going off the rails. Why does it have to be one or the other? Being able to turn to the director and say, “show me what you’re thinking” and having him do just that strikes me as a good thing. I would certainly expect to look at his cut and either tell him “it sucks, go away,” or put my interpretation of what he did into my cut. If we disagree so often or he trusts me so little that I’m relegated to button pusher, then I’m outta there like a shot. Life’s too short.

That said, people in this town will swallow a lot to be involved in a potential award-winning movie. Sad to say.