The Healthy Edit by John Rosenberg

Author:John Rosenberg [Rosenberg, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138233799
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-12-05T23:00:00+00:00

Case Study

I once had the disturbing experience of walking into the editing room of a director who’d been cutting alongside his editor. The producer had given him his own editing room, perhaps to get him out of the way. The sight that met my eyes was a large, wide fellow with meaty hands hunched over a flatbed editing machine with hundreds of single frame clips taped to the walls, windows, and trim bins. He’d been working on the same scene for weeks, cutting out frames here and there and then putting them back in, reminiscent of the torture of Prometheus. Ultimately, it didn’t make much difference, and what he eventually presented as a fine cut was taken away from him by the studio who hired a film doctor to recut it. Obviously, there were bigger issues at stake than a frame or two.

Years later, when a film I’d edited was being conformed in order to make release prints, a visit to the negative cutter finally drove the point home once and for all. I’d stopped by on an emergency mission from the director to remove a scene before the film was sent to the lab for printing. I had a workprint with me as a guide so I could match the key numbers on the negative with their printed-through counterparts on the print. Also, since it was film, I could compare the images and scene changes on the negative with those on the celluloid print. After locking the workprint, negative, and soundtrack together in the synchronizer, I carefully began rolling down to the middle of the film where the designated scene lay. Long before I reached that point, however, I noticed something that sent a chill through me.

The negative was a slightly different cut than I’d submitted in my locked reels. At first the images on the negative had corresponded exactly with the images on the workprint. Then suddenly the cuts shifted. The shot on the negative ended a frame earlier than the shot on my workprint. And the next shot began a frame earlier. As I continued to roll through the reels, I found that periodically, throughout the course of the film, shots would end a couple frames earlier or later than my version. But by the time the next scene appeared, everything was back in sync. What had happened here?

The negative cutter had recut some of my footage! She was considered one of the best in the business, so I figured there must be some explanation. That, or she had secretly been recutting, improving upon editors’ work like some elf in a workshop. I called her and asked what had happened. Because we were friends and she didn’t want to lie to me, she told me the truth. She’d messed up and cut the negative a frame early. With a negative, unlike a positive print, you can’t simply reattach it with a piece of tape. With a negative you lose a frame every time you make a cut in order to hot splice it to the next shot.

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