Splice Now

Last night I received the Robert Wise Award for “Journalistic Illumination of the Art of Editing,” at the American Cinema Editors’ 57th annual Eddie Awards banquet. It was a wonderful night for me, the culmination of nearly 20 years of work in this community. This morning, I’m still basking in the glow of the support I felt from so many friends and colleagues.

ACE president Alan Heim presented me with the award and mentioned this site, so I expect that at least of few of you will be here today for the first time. Welcome!

I encourage you to browse around and get a sense of what’s here. The content is bit more perennial than on some blogs. There are Avid tips, discussions of Avid problems, talk about the changing world of editing, and notes about the growing influence of media in society. Your way into this material is through the links in the right hand column: “top posts,” “recent posts” and “categories.” If you want to read it all you can do that via the archives.

I hope you’ll add your ideas via the comment links at the end of each post. A blog is a conversation, and I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

My acceptance speech took off from some of the recent postings here. The editing revolution of the ’90s was about tools. We saw our Moviolas and KEMs replaced with computers and hard drives. Things seem to have settled down in the last few years, but my contention is that there’s another revolution brewing, one that is stealthier because a lot of it is taking place outside our editing rooms, but in the long run, no less disruptive. That’s the workflow revolution, the many changes that together will soon result in all the materials of our work, from camera to screen, turning into zeros and ones. The effects of that transformation: inexpensive, desktop software, internet based post-production, portable editing rooms and increasing competition, are going to rock our world just as much or more than the first phase did.

We did a lot of things right in the 1990s. In particular, we focused on two things: education and community support. Today, I think we need to take another hard look at the changes around us and push our educational programs aggressively to cover these new issues. I know we can handle it. Our strength as a community served us so well in the first phase, and we’re wiser now, but we’ve gotta get moving.

Technorati Tags: edit, film editing, video

This entry was posted on February 19, 2007 at 8:24 am and is filed under Editors Guild, Quality of Life, Workflow. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.