Digital Editing: Beyond the Edit - Text 2
Filmmaking had always included various processes for “compositing” discrete elements into a single image – optical printing, superimpositions, etc. But it was inevitably limited by the materiality, the physical fact of the photographic image, which could be manipulated only, so to speak, on the surface. Editing was, in this respect, restricted by the limits of photography.
As such restrictions seem to have been overcome, editing may now be thought of as a complex and comprehensive process of synthesis, or as a system for the management and organization of immense amounts of visual and auditory information; not just the arrangement of shots in a sequence, but the organization of all the possible elements that will comprise the shots – to the extent, perhaps, that we may no longer be able to think of the shot as the most basic element in the creation or understanding of a film. Filmmakers may now work at a more “granular” level, with more fine-grained cinematic elements.
