Response to Walter Murch

So I had some time this past week to pick up "In the Blink of an Eye" by Robert Murch and read a piece or two from it.  Murch is an Academy Award-winning film editor and sound designer, and is best known for his sound designing work in Apocalypse Now and Return to Oz - which he directed.

What I'm going to specifically focus on for this entry is the problems Murch defines when film made (or makes) the transition from analog to digital.  In the early 1980s, hard drives were bulky, primitive, and didn't really work all that well, so film was stored on analog forms of media, such as videotapes or laserdiscs.  But then in the later 1980s, technological devices such as hard drives and more advanced ways of storage started making its way into the film world.  Film began being digitized directly onto a computers hard disk, and I'm pretty sure its safe to say it scared film industry people back then - technology still scares people now.

Now more onto a more personal level.  My dad used to teach film and television broadcasting at the university and college level up till the early 1990s, when he passed away due to stomach cancer.  This obviously meant that my dad new a great deal about cameras and filming, and I can remember massive cameras laying around the house and stacks of film sitting around.  Yes, the film industry had already made their way to the digital era, but for people who weren't in the industry, analog was still the way to go.  Now instead of hauling around huge video cameras like my dad used to do, I can easily carry a video camera comfortably in my hand.  Not only this - the cameras consumers use today are high-definition, something that would of been out of the question back in my dads time.

Alright, now back to Murch.  Right.  Murch points out a couple negative aspects that come with this move from analog to digital, all of which I find quite interesting.

1. The Amount of Memory - early hard drives didn't really have much memory anyway.  This meant that films couldn't be stored as one large chunk, and moving from one chunk of the film to the next meant swapping hard disks which the film was stored on.  Not fun.
2. Bottleneck - Early machines and digital forms of storage were so expensive that buying more than one was next to impossible.  This meant that the key people involved in producing the film had to work in shifts, simply because there was only one machine to use.
3. Complicated, Inconvenient and Expensive - The big editing machines were bulky and expensive, and copies of dailies had to be specially made to be read by the machine that Murch calls the EditDroid. 
4. The Quality of the Image - Image quality is something that is most important for people who watch television or movies today - people go gaga over large screen displays.  In order to store films onto digital media, the data would be shrunk down, where a lot of resolution would be lost in the process.  Murch says that this makes it impossible to see hidden problems. 
5. Ease of Making the Cut Itself - These editing machines like the Avid were keyboard intensive, which was not what most film editors were comfortable with.  We still see this today - video editing programs like Final Cut or Premier are extremely keyboard intensive.  I'm not even sure if you could properly edit a film or video without a keyboard.
6. Works Best When Needed Least - The machines couldn't handle too much, and editors would often get a message that they had maxed out the machines processing abilities.  Murch says that this would cause things to go out of sync.  Dropped frames, anyone?
7. Reliability of the Edit Decision List - the edit decision list is conformed to match what is in the computer, which turned out to be super problematic on early editing machines.  This all comes down to difference in frame rates.  In Europe, film and video run at 25 frames per second, and in the United States and other Western countries, film runs at 24 frames per second while video runs at 30 frames per second.  This meant that some mathematical equations needed to be done before doing any transferring or copying.  Messing this up would probably result in a massive headache for editors.

And thats Murch's list!  I think there will always be an argument over analog vs. digital.