Non-Linear Editing Quotes

I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of film making. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.

People come up to me and say "Steve, what is film editing?" And I say "How should I know? You're the director.

In animation, you can often defer decisions or make changes later.

Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.

The thing I realized about final cut is it's the power of the best cut. I didn't have final cut on 'Prisoners,' but what you saw is the best cut. 'Sicario' is a directors' cut. 'Arrival' is a directors' cut.

Learning how to edit movies was a real breakthrough.

The film is made in the editing room.

Comparing filmmaking to a plastic model, shooting is the process where you mold and color each piece, and editing is where you build a finished whole from the pieces you molded and colored. Obviously, the latter is the most enjoyable part in the making of plastic models, so editing is the process in filmmaking I enjoy the most. But at the same time, editing can be a painstaking task, too.

I can't drag myself away from 'Final Cut Pro.' It is a digital video editing system. I am obsessed with it, but I am always away from home, and I can't use it.

As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.

[ Digital revolution ] only has allowed me to work faster, editing digitally, which I'm doing right now, a film on volcanoes. I can edit almost as fast as I'm thinking, editing with celluloid means always searching for this little reel of film, and number it, and scribble on it with some sort of pens, and gluing it together, and working on a flatbed. It's much, much slower.

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.

Tracking action without cutting is the least jarring method of placing the audience into a real-time experience where they are the ones making the subtle choices of where and when to look.

I even agree with the new digital ways of filmmaking, where you don't even have physical film in the camera, but to be honest, I wouldn't want to use it.

In movies, you shoot out of sequence, so the issue of reality is really taken out of it.

With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.

You no more have to come to the city and access a laboratory to make a film. If you have a DSLR and a reasonably powerful laptop, you could be making films anywhere.

I film quite a bit of footage, then edit. Changes before your eyes, things you can do and things you can't. My attitude is always 'let it keep rolling.'

Now that I can edit the whole thing on AVID and edit the whole thing on tape, maybe I will do the next digitally, because maybe the quality will become less obvious between tape and film.

I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.

Movies are an editor's medium.

With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.

I took one film class at NYU over a summer and learned the basics - you know, how to load a camera and how to light and how to edit - and I became a film editor.

My first three movies, I didn't start editing until we were finished shooting. That's unthinkable to me now.

You know, people always think if you start out as a film editor, you shoot less footage. Actually, just the opposite is true. I tend to grab as much coverage as I can because as a former editor I know how important it is to have those few frames.