Editing Room Workflow
The buzzword of the post-production intellegencia of recent has been workflow. In recent times corporate behemoths have gobbled up one time boutiques like Warner Bros. or Fox. The management of these corporate monsters has put a premium on efficiency in the editing room. Long gone is the time for directors and editors to carefully weave a tapestry of cinematic emotions. One waxes nostalgic for the days when a person would be walking past an editorial building dodging a moviola thrown out the window by an irate yet creatively motivated director.
Some of the old school editors are having trouble making the transition into this new world of "media interplay", "digi-deliver", "WAN share" and "low-pay". In order to ease the pain of this transition we need to crack the jargon of this new world.
The next chart illustrates the Editorial Triangle. Lunch, dailies, and paycheck form a foundation for all editorial actions. Without any one of these important ingredients an editor will not be able to cut scenes. For example, a production may have paid millions in the lensing of their latest blockbuster, given the editor his weight in gold with generous overtime provisions, yet left him in a cutting room with no access to a good lunch spot. They might as well not release the picture.
The editor does not work in a vacuum. Editing is collaboration between editors, directors and producers as they hone the footage into a dazzling effect of images to entertain and inspire the audience. This requires that these grownups check their huge
egos at the door when they enter an editing room. In the old days, humility was not an obtainable commodity, and hencethe flying Moviolas. But these days with the efficiency of modern editorial workflow, the collaborative process has become part of the paradigm.
The editor after living with the material for a many hours comes up with a compelling and entertaining cut. The director comes in and destroys the editor's pace by adding his luma crane shots he had fought the producers to have.
