The 2016 Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship has been awarded to film editor Eileen Meyer, best known for her work on the award-winning documentary Best of Enemies. In announcing the news, the awards committee said, “Eileen impressed us with her confident spirit, strong work ethic, and the ways in which she has been pushing herself to new professional heights. We also loved her playful and insightful editorial style in her work as an editor of Best of Enemies.” Meyer will receive the fellowship on Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at the SXSW Film Festival Awards Ceremony in Austin, Texas. In addition to a […]
by Paula Bernstein on Mar 10, 2016While most of the attention paid to Blackmagic’s releases at NAB went to their slew of new and updated cameras, they also released DaVinci Resolve 12, which they say has made a bigger improvement in the last year than their last five years of updates. When they introduced 11 last year, they announced new editing tools within the app. They’ve further expanded Resolve as a feasible NLE with multicam features, tons of trim mode options, and a brand new audio engine for audio editing. I played around with Resolve at the booth. The timeline definitely felt familiar and the ease of making […]
by Joey Daoud on Apr 16, 2015If you’ve ever dealt with a video project that needed feedback from a team of people, chances are you’ve worked with Dropbox files, password-protected Vimeo links, and a scattered selection of email chains. Wipster aims to streamline the process with their online platform. Simply upload your video file and choose who you want to share it with. Everyone you list will get an email with a unique URL to view the video without needing to create an account and log in. From there they can use Wipster’s powerful commenting feature, which lets any collaborator comment on any frame in the video just by […]
by Joey Daoud on Apr 15, 2015Disney has a research division, and this video demonstrates something pretty cool they’ve been working on: an algorithm that automatically cuts together footage from multiple cameras. This isn’t entirely a new development: in the video above, the research team compares their results with those obtained using Vyclone, which kind of does the same thing. But Vyclone has trouble sorting footage in an orderly fashion if the camera pans between two separate actions happening in the same area, tending to randomly cut between the two. There are other advantages to Disney’s algorithm, which respects the 180-degree-rule when cutting between multiple sources, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 18, 2014“Cutting is not just something that we have to do because of the discontinuous nature of the way we shoot films,” Walter Murch muses in this clip from a recent conversation with Iron Man/Chef director Jon Favreau. “We actually, both as filmmakers and as audiences, like these sudden juxtapositions of concepts.” Editing, of course, is Murch’s beat — his livelihood and the subject of multiple books he’s both written and been interviewed for. A little overlap with past comments is to be expected, and his thoughts about understanding editing as what happens when you blink and your eye moves from […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 1, 2014Besides the new URSA and Studio camera announcements, Blackmagic announced some new updates to their popular coloring software DaVinci Resolve. While the newest version boasts over 100 new features, the vast majority of them are improvements to the editing capabilities. In previous versions the editing area of Resolve was more for making tweaks to an ingested timeline to correct any errors or drop in footage that didn’t import properly. Now it’s aiming to be a full fledged editor. The latest version adds a bunch of features you’d find in most NLEs – lots of timeline trimming options and keyboard controls, […]
by Joey Daoud on Apr 10, 2014The folks at FCP.co have detailed a series of tests designed to push their new Mac Pro hardware and Final Cut Pro X software to their breaking point. In one, they layer over 1,000 tracks in 4K. In another, they create a 500,000-pixel wide timeline. And in the final, they create and scroll through a 558-day timeline. Here, from FCP.co, are their conclusions: We pushed FCPX and the Mac Pro to silly limits, of course nobody will make a year long or a 500,000 pixel wide timeline, but it’s good to know the combination will go that far. It seems […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2014Legendary film editor, sound designer, writer, translator, amateur astronomer and director Walter Murch needs no introduction. (Oh, what the hell, his credits include The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tetro and more.) In addition to being a great filmmaker, he’s also a great teacher and talker about film. Here, at the 2013 Sheffield Doc Fest, where he accompanied the doc, Particle Fever, he gives an inspiring speech on film editing, technology, audience expectation, how film grammar is changing with digital technologies, and physics. Don’t miss this.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 23, 2014Editing Tyler Durden out of a Fight Club sequence may seem like a (spoiler alert) self-explanatory hijink, but Richard Trammell, the man behind “Fight Club Minus Tyler Durden” actually cooked up the idea while watching the trailer for Lawrence of Arabia. “I thought it would be funny to take Peter O’Toole out of it,” says Trammell, “Before I realized it would be more interesting to remove a character who doesn’t really exist within the world of the movie.” Trammell then perused Fight Club for scenes in which Brad Pitt’s character did not obscure the background, before taking to AfterEffects. “I made freeze frames of […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 22, 2014Music in cinema continually captivates audiences. Scores and soundtracks can become as renowned as a film itself and play a large part in an audience’s emotional engagement with a movie. Awards are distributed honoring Best Original Song, Best Original Music Score, Best Film Music, and Best Music Direction at multiple film festivals and award ceremonies. But music has also always been a fascinating subject for movies as well. Struggling musicians to sensational bands, and everyone in between, have been captured in film. The Sundance Film Festival is often the first venue at which these movies premiere, and this year is […]
by Alexandra Byer on Jan 20, 2014