|
|
|
And now something you might have noticed everywhere - these little yellow cores. They are also made of hard polystyrene, and they are very important in the editing process. The further we get into the edit, the more of these things we need as we break down scenes and separate different soundtracks, like the dialogue track and the sound effects and the music. Each reel needs its own core. It is not unusual to use 50 to 100 cores when editing a short film. It may seem a precarious way to store film, and it is. Bigger reels must be handled with care so that the core doesn't slip out of the center, but cores make the film easier to load onto different types of editing machines and projectors. There are special "split reels" with removable flanges that can be put onto a projector or a bench editor and then removed from the core when the work is done.Once the work print and all the soundtracks (There can be as many as twelve or twenty-four - or more - on major motion pictures) are the way we want them, we LOCK the tracks, which is a filmy way of saying we declare the thing finished. This is important because once we mix the soundtracks there's no going back. So while the soundtracks are at the sound engineer being mixed onto a single track of mag stock, some very precise person has to match the camera negative to the work print. It takes a long time to go back through all the original rolls of film and find just the little pieces that you used in the final edit, but it can be done with a system of edge numbers which are the same on workprint and negative.
These days new digital media has caused a lot of changes in the film production process. Amateur filmmakers are turning to digital video, mostly for the sake of convenience and availability of consumer level computer based editing. However, after dubbing and editing suite time are figured in, broadcast qulaity professional video comes out costing almost as much as film. Digital editing of film has taken some of the steps out of the process, including workprint, mag sound track and actual cutting of the film. But nothing invented to date has been able to match the light sensitivity and resolution of film, so the negative, the release print, and good old-fashioned film shoots are bound to be around for a good long time. In fact some editors still prefer to work all the old fashioned way. There is something in the time it allows one to think about what one is doing, as well as the feel of actually working with the film itself, that makes the editing process valuable.