Post Production
Editing in the
connected world
Thomson’s STEPHAN KEXEL reports.
expected to work alone. Indeed, often the
editor is not a specialist: it is now common
n the early days of nonlinear editing practice for television journalists to cut their
I
there was little requirement for own stories using edit tools on their own
editors to work together with other desktops.
systems. It was enough that How have all these conflicting pressures
nonlinear editing happened, even if it was in a been resolved? By the edit system itself
silo. That will no longer work for practical becoming more all-encompassing with all the
workflows: editors are expected to be functionality in one box; by making it simple
connected devices. And even this situation is and seamless to operate; and most important of
changing - the ability to read virtually any all by using extremely advanced software on
format is being demanded as routine, and it is ever more powerful hardware to create the
the output functionality that is becoming more processing speed to make everything happen in
and more important. real time.
Nonlinear editing has only been around for Speed is a really significant issue in
two decades, and yet in that time the industry multiple delivery formats from HD down to the choosing an editor. The developers of software
has been transformed. When the first nonlinear mobile phone. packages that, perhaps, rely on rendering more
editors appeared, the assumption was that you In parallel there has been a change in the than they should tend to argue that these
would ingest the content from analogue tape business and operational environment around breaks in productivity allow you to pause for
and return it to exactly the same tape format. editing, too. 20 years ago an editor would have thought, or over the course of an edit they do
Today we are three generations on: we have at least one edit assistant plus engineering not add significantly to the time.
moved from analogue to digital, from linear backup (and a constant stream of freshly made But the inescapable fact is that realtime
tapes to files, and from standard definition to cappuccinos). Today an editor would be processing makes for better, more creative
editing. Psychologically, if you know that
trying something new will take a few seconds,
maybe a few minutes, then you will make that
change. If, in the back of your mind, you know
it is going to take half an hour to render the
result then you will not take the risk. So the
fine details that make the difference between a
good result and a great one just do not happen.
Speed
Achieving speed in an editor is down to
three things: the right hardware platform, the
right codecs to handle the content, and very
efficient software to process the media.
The standard computer of today tends now
to have two powerful processing centres: the
CPU (which could well be a multi-core device)
and the graphics processing unit (GPU). In the
classic computer architecture for which the PC
was developed the GPU is there just to draw
the screen, but it has to be a powerful device to
66 IBE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008
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