The Tech of Making Movies, Part Two

your throat? A little bit? Um. So this is part two of our movie making podcast series, and we're gonna be doing a few more episodes about making movies in the future, although they'll probably be some buffer episodes between this and they because we don't want to just turn into the movie making podcast. But but it turns out there's a lot of tech behind making movies. Yeah, musically enough.

We we had intended this to be two episodes, one about what happens when you're making the movie and then what happens afterward, And as it turns out, uh, there's probably gonna be enough material to create many more of these podcasts. So we're gonna just pick a couple topics today and in post production, what happens after the movie has been shot, and uh, you know, we'll get through what we can get through and the rest of it

will shelve until later. Right, So future episodes might have information such as creating soundtracks, doing special effects, um, and actually just getting sound onto a film. We didn't even touch that in the last one. We had totally intended to. But thirty minutes went by so quickly. So let's look at editing films and talk about the process and how

it started. Okay, so the earliest films were these static one shot films, as you know, the essentially the camera was was set running and then they captured stuff that happened in front of the camera and that's what you got to see. And we're talking like these are the earliest earliest films back when the medium was brand new, the technology was brand new, the industry was being born. Yeah, there was there was no such thing as a movie star at this point, where movie stars were things like

a train going by that kind of stuff. Because it was really a proof of concept at this point. Uh, And it took a big leap to get to the point where we started to edit film. And by leap, I don't mean just technology, because actually the technology, at least the early technology of film editing, it was incredibly simple, is essentially apparent scissors and some tape. What the leap

I'm talking about is a psychological leap. Now, it's hard for us to imagine this now because we've all lived in the era in which movies and television are everywhere. But think back to imagine that you are in the age. Actually you know what way back machine get in? Here we go this next copyright all right, our time travel machine patent pending. Let's see, we're just gonna set this to the beginning of let's say, the twentieth century. Okay, you're all right, and here we are beginning of the

twentieth century. Now we're talking about a time when entertainment was essentially you would go to a you know, maybe like a vaudeville theater and watch a live show. So what you're used to seeing are actors coming out on stage where you can see the actor. Uh, you watch a sequence from beginning to end, and you get one view and that's it. Right. You might change some scenery between scenes, but other than that, you know, you're watching

a scene play in full no change of perspective. Film gave you the opportunity to use multiple perspectives in one scene. So you can have two people talking, but you could have the camera focused on one character for part of that scene and then take a totally different shot and focus it on another character for the rest of that scene. We see this all the time in any sequence that has dialogue. Sure, so you might be like over the shoulder of one character and you're looking at the face

of another, and then it switches views. Well, in the earliest days of filmmaking, no one knew that that would work because no one had done it before. No one had thought, is the human brain capable of following a sequence of events that are happening at different perspectives and make that one narrative? And it turned out yes we can.

And once we were able to to establish the fact that it doesn't really matter where you place the camera, doesn't really matter where you make the cut as long as continuity is preserved, uh, people will follow and and go along with you, and they have no trouble thinking, oh, well, this is a continuation of that scene. But before we tried it, we didn't know. It might have been that you would cut from one perspective to another, and the

whole audience go, what just happened? I don't understand anymore, This doesn't make sense. I'm leaving, and I'm sure there are people listening who are saying, no, that's not possible. Of course it was going to work out like that, but you don't know until you try. No, No, And it's it's like science. You know, you have someone who makes a discovery, the next generation of scientists sort of

take it for granted because it's been proven scientifically. So now that we're at the point we are now these things we could take for granted because we know for a fact that they work, But we took the work of the early filmmakers to discover that and and and allow us to build on that at this point. Yeah, I mean, and there was really no way of testing it other than editing film. When you get down to it,

I mean, what were you gonna do. Put two actors on the stage, have one of them facing upstage, one facing downstage, deliver a line of dialogue, have them switch places and do it again. Well, you know, today we might use multiple camera angles, you know, with with several different cameras from different perspectives and and have it all done that way. But you know, back then it might not have occurred to anybody to do that, or it

might have been too expensive for them to try. Right, So, a lot of the early early films looked like they were just film productions of it, like a stage show. You know, the camera pretty much had a view as if you were sitting in the audience watching a stage production. So let's get to the point where they figure out, hey, we can edit, we can actually take little bits, we can cut out stuff we don't need, we can switch perspectives, everything's all right. Actually, that that opened up a huge

world of possibilities in filmmaking. Because let's say that Chris and I want to film a scene where the two of us are having a discussion, and we have found this amazing room to film the scene in, and we want one of us to have a window to our back where with a beautiful vista. Unfortunately, the room we found it's amazing, but it has a terrible view. But we found this other room that's terrible but as an

amazing view. Well, film editing, of course, allows us to film one side of that conversation in one room and the other side of the conversation in another room. It's taking place in two totally different times, in two totally different locations, edited together to make it look like a single time and place. And again, this an amazing thing about film editing that had not existed before. There was no way of doing it. You had to have everyone in the same place at the same time in order

to get something done. So how they do it well, they shoot the film. They shoot as much film as they need for as many takes as they need in each location. And then they end up making a workprint of the film so they're they're able to look at it and beyond the negative. They still have the negative,

but they've made a workprint. An editor goes through and views those scenes scene by scene, uh, and then physically cuts up the film, physically tapes film together to create a new print, which usually we call like an editor's print or a rough cut. And then from that you could look and say, all right, this is good, we need to shave a few seconds off this scene, or uh, this take is too long. That kind of stuff. It's a lot easier to cut than it is to add.

That's one of the big problems with the old old work version of film editing. Once you started cutting, you're really committing yourself. You didn't have a lot of opportunity to switch stuff out either. If you said, you know this, this other take worked a lot better than the one that you're using, it's a lot harder to switch that

out using the old old method of film editing. Yeah, this is a really painstaking process, and you know, it probably was a little easier for film editors than it was for sound editors when you had to listen to a thing and sort of guess where the tape was, uh, when you would cut it, because you couldn't actually see it. But yeah, I mean we're literally talking about somebody sitting there at the board with a light you know, the light table, you can actually see what's in each picture.

And then you know, take the the scissors or I assume probably a razor blade something it cuts you know, pretty precisely, and and splicing the two together. Yea, uh, you know that that's that takes a lot of work. It's it's painstaking and eventually um technology started to catch up to this technique. That's you start seeing editing machines like the Moviola Yeah. So Moviola is essentially like a projector where it's a viewer to let you view what's on each frame of film, so you can go through

and uh look at a print of film. And then it also even has uh the the stuff there so that you can cut the film where you want it to be cut, uh, and then you would splice it together and you can view it again. Um. They're really loud machines. Old timey editors loved them. They swore by them, saying that you know, you just you would, you would craft a film, you would build it frame by frame.

And the editor was just as important part of the picture as the director or producer, uh, because the editor really helped shape what the movie became. The director would do all the things about, you know, making sure people were giving the performances. The director wanted that kind of stuff. But the editor was the one who said, you know, this take is the perfect reaction, but it's a reaction to something that was said in this other take. So I'm going to be the one to combine the two.

That's right. Don't forget the editor is important. Yeah, I am constantly reminded of that fact. I put a sign up in his cubicle, so he doesn't forget right. Yeah, and whenever I do anything wrong, big red ink. So that's that's the old style of film editing, you know, the actual physical cutting of film, and some of that still goes on today, depending upon how a particular film

company is doing a particular shoot. But a lot of the editing that you see these days are a lot of the editing that that movie studios are are using, uh, involves digital editing, that's right. And um, you know, of course this has been made possible by the the advent of of the low cost machines that we have today. Of course was Uh, it's a lot cheaper to do now than it would have been even ten years ago. Um. And a lot of videos are thoroughly invested in and

using the technology. Um. Of course, the using technology like that to edit of a movie in post production goes back even to preproduction, because I mean a lot of In a lot of cases, they decide the the director and producer, I guess, decide who they want to use beforehand, go ahead and tell them I guess what they're going to do, what they have in mind, and then you know,

once they've actually done all the shooting. Then they bring the the material back to the studio and of course, um that could be either film or you know, an actual digital version of the uh, the movie as it exists, you know, directly after it's been shot. Right. Yeah, you can uh to do digital editing. There are several different ways you can you can go about it. You can either probably the easiest way is you're using a digital camera to start with. Oh yeah, because then you don't

have to worry about any any kind of conversion. You don't have to come in vert anything, you don't have to scan anything. You you just port the data from your camera over into the computer system and then you can start editing. Uh porting talking about your capturing the video. You're capturing it from the camera and putting it into the computer. Uh. That process can take a while, depending on how high resolution you were shooting and the connection

you're using between the camera and the computer. But but it's still faster than converting film to digital. Now, to convert film to digital, you've got a couple of different uh options as well. You can use something called a tell us any which it's sort of it's kind of like a scanner in a in a sense, and some scanners are called tell us aanys and vice versa. The terms are somewhat interchangeable, although purists will tell you that

there is a distinct difference between the two. Uh. Tell us any convert its film to video formats and UH. You may have heard us refer before about the different frame rates of film versus video, the twenty four frames per second for film versus the thirty frames per second for video that's in the US. I should point out that's not that's not a global standard. Um. It's different in different regions. It's a standard, but not the standard. Yet. It's a standard in the United States and a few

other countries. UM. So at any rate, because twenty four and thirty don't match up quite right, you have to do some some trickery to get them to kind of coincide more closely, and then that can introduce some jitter. Uh. This is why if you watch a movie that's been converted to video, Let's say you were watching an old VHS tape or you were watching a movie broadcast on TV, you might notice that it doesn't look quite the way you remembered it looking when you saw it on the screen. UM.

And some of that's the conversion process. So uh, Now, if you're using a scanner, some scanners they'll just scan it in at the proper frames per second. Some telestening's due too at this point, um, well, so that you no longer have to worry about that. It's not it's not an issue. And so you can digitally manipulate stuff at the same frame rate as you would, um if if you were just working on film right all the time.

So you've moved the film into the digital format. Um, and now you have two options, two big options available to you. You can either use the digital media to assemble your movie in the order that you wanted in like using choosing the takes, choosing you know, the transitions, all that kind of stuff, and and uh and essentially making a video checklist for the negative cutter. So what what you would do is once you've put your movie together, and again, the cool thing about digital is that it

makes it really easy to switch stuff out. So let's say that you know, you have two different, very different takes of the same scene and you want to see how they both play out in the context of the overall film. It's not that hard to lift it one out and replace it with the other. If it's all digital, it's really hard to do with film. Sure. For one thing, you have to pay more money just to get more film to do it. So you assembled your movie in

video format, you hand that to your negative cutter. Your negative cutter goes back to the negative of the original film you shot, and using the video as a guide, assembles the movie. Right. So that's one way of doing it that seems almost as painstaking as the original version. The middle process is not as pain is not as painstaking because it is easier to edit once or it's easier to assemble the movie and the way you want

that part is easy easier anyway. Um, but yes, there is still quite a bit of manual labor the you have to do, oh yeah yeah, And it takes a real skilled cutter to make sure that you get what you captured in video, because you definitely don't want to get to the point where you view the the negative version.

You know, when you've made a print and you you think, wait, that doesn't follow what I made in the digital right, So your other option, instead of using that as a guide, you can actually print to film from your digital video, and in that case what you do is you have you have film coming in, you manipulate it however you need to. You can do color correction. This this is actually where you get the most freedom as an editor, right you you digitize the film, print the original of

the film as it has been shot. You take the material there on the computer and then print it to film exactly so so that way you can do things like color correction. You can do you can do some effects. You can do lots of stuff that you could not do if you were just assembling the movie, right because I mean, if you're just assembling the movie and making a checklist, it's not like you could insert a huge special effect in the middle because you wouldn't have the film.

The negative cutter will be like, all right, that's awesome, where is this? Well that's That's something that I think

it is worth pointing out to. You can do things with color even when you're doing you know, a manual film at it, but it takes a lot more work because if you're going to do something like that, you have to go in frame by frame, you know, certain special effects and things that you want applied, and you've got a lot more freedom to do that with the digital process because you can add those things in the computer that you you know, would have to go in hand by hand to say, if you wanted to, uh,

like all the famous movies that have been that were shot in black and white and we're later colorized for TV and things. Um, you know that has to be done. You know, if you're going to do that for film, that would be a real paint in the neck to go in and and actually paint the cells you know, or that i should say, the frames one by one. That would be a real real pain in the next

to do. And their entire companies that that's all they do. Yeah, they take other people's films and then they do color correction. I mean you'll see that in the credits of a movie if you look for it, you might see that there's color correction by such and such company. Um. But if you use this, this digital intermediate process, you could, if you have an editor skilled at this, could actually have the editor do some color correction without ever having

to go to another company. Um. Chances are you probably still would have to because if you're transferring back to film, uh, then there's always the chance that just that transfer process means that you need to do some clean up on your print before you start making uh copies. Also, I should have said there is one other option besides printing the film. Oh yes, yeah, distributing digitally. Good point. You

don't have to go back to film at all. In fact, if you did, you can either convert a film to digital and keep it digital, or of course you could use the digital camera and it's just digital the entire time. Uh. And in either case you could distribute it digitally. Now the we we talked about this a little bit in the other podcast. It makes it a lot easier to distribute the film. But on the flip side, there aren't

as many projectors that can run it, right. You have to have the equipment on the at the theaters the side. Otherwise it's sort of a moot point. Yeah, you could send them a disk and then they said, this is nice. We have nothing that can play this, yes, yeah, yeah. If it's all the old style film projectors, then it doesn't do you any good. So as technology catches up in the cinemas, in the actual movie houses, uh, that will become a bigger and bigger push. I think it's

just because of the ease of use. I mean, the the easier it is, uh, the more likely people will adopt it. Now they are those film purists who bemoan this fact because they think that it doesn't have the same sort of quality as the old films. And I can see their point. I mean it there is there's an argument to be made for both using the old style film editing and the digital editing editing methods um and it's two completely different philosophies and two completely different methodologies.

When you're doing the old film editing process, you had to be O. C D really, because you had to be able to keep track of miles of film, right, and you're cutting film and you're gonna have to keep track of all these different canisters of film until it's all put together, and it just it took organizational skills to a whole new level. I mean, you had to be an amazing organizational genius really to be a great film editor. Now a lot of that is done for

you with computers. That's that's one reason why they call the digital process a non linear editing process, because you can access any part of the movie at any time digitally once you once you've converted into digital format, or if you shot it digitally, then you already have it. You can go to any part of that movie at any time, and the computer essentially is keeping track of

everything for you. Now, there's not really a standard way across all different editing suites that allows you to h to organize your data in a in a standard format. So if you were trained on one kind of film editing software, you may actually have to learn a totally different style if you if the company you work for it switches, right, It's not like they all have the exact same layout. So that's a downside. Um. I was gonna talk also, just really quickly about the scanners. It's

also a time consuming process depending upon the equipment you have. Well, if you wanted to be of any quality, yes, yes, So uh let's talk about film quality. Here's another issue. People talk about how film the quality of film may be higher than digital, and that was probably true, especially in the early days, but it's less true now. Um yeah, I mean that that's a fairly recent development. I mean just thinking about the quality of for example, consumer grade

uh digital still cameras. You know a lot of people were unwilling to switch make the switch to a digital still camera because they said, well, you know, it's just not as good equality as my film camera. But you know, today people take photos with their phones, the little cameras that are built into their phones, and expect them to be you know, good enough to print. Maybe not, you know, archival. Maybe we'll be blowing it up to the size of

a building. But right, But you know, of course the people who are in the movie studios have access to a much wider range and much deeper range of equipment than than you or I would have because they have deeper pockets. But but yeah, I mean it's it's still you know, only been in the last few years, a couple of decades, right, And and Chris sent me a really good article from Editors Guild magazine. It was called

Digital Intermediate for Film. And in that article, uh, it's discussed about the resolution of film versus the resolution of digital. So when you scan a movie in are you losing resolution? And depending on the scanner you're using, yeah, you you do lose some resolution. And uh, and also the higher resolution you're scanning to the high resolution you're converting into digital, the more information that the more data that that requires. Right, So if you're scanning a film and you wanted to

be as true as possible to the original film. That's gonna result in an enormous file and it's gonna and that also means it's gonna take more time just to capture the film. So the example that Editors Guild magazine makes was that right now, the the what they call the gold standard for resolution and digital film is four K, which is uh four thousand ninety pixels horizontally by three thousand pixels vertically, and there there are actual digital cameras

out there that can capture video at that resolution. At the four K resolution, Now, some purists will argue that film itself really ultimately could be up to six K in resolution. However, that we're talking about that as a perfect negative. A perfect negative could be at six K resolution. Once you convert that negative into a workprint, you lose resolution, and once you start copying from the workprint to make your prints a film that you distribute, you lose even more.

So by the time you will see a film on the screen, it may be closer to two K than six K just through the whole process. So, while film at its ideal is a higher resolution than most digital video, you don't see the ideal, so it doesn't really matter. Okay, no, that makes sense. So when you're scanning the film, you have to choose what resolution you want to scan it at. And if you're scanning, the higher resolution you you use, the more information is going to require, the more time

it's going to require to scan. Until recently, that meant that it could take weeks to scan uh film. For let's say a feature link film, it could take weeks to scan all that film into four K quality. It's gotten to the point now where there are some companies that have scanners that can if you're if you're scanning it at two K, which remember that's the resolution that most feature films appear in, and once you get to the theater, if you're scanning in at two K, you

can do it in real time. So at thirty frames per second, it's not a problem. Uh. If you want to do four K, it tends to be a little slower, usually between eight and sixteen second eighteen and sixteen frames per second, so you're scanning it in at a slower speed than you would be playing the movie. However, at least that's improve somewhat, So that's the editing process in general.

I guess we could actually talk about what you're doing when you're digitally editing films, right You're you're cutting and pasting, but you're cutting and pasting pixels instead of uh, instead

of film actual film frames. That's true. Actually, the consumer level video editing programs that you might see as part of UM, you know, just your your standard I want to make a DVD to send to my grandparents type of programs, sort of like I movie for example, for UH for Macintosh, UM, I know there are several for for Windows that that do essentially the same thing. These are, you know, fairly inexpensive pieces of software, and you might

think that they're very dissimilar to high level programs. I'm sure professional editors would probably say they're completely different. UM. But essentially the screen that that you look at when you're using these these programs, if you've seen any of these, they're they're really not all that dits similar. You have a video editing window where you can actually see where

you are. It's like you would be, you know, looking at a particular frame of film, and then you have a timeline and you can take different pieces of video and drop them into the timeline to create at one long video segment. UM. And that's essentially what the video editor is is doing with that software now, um or the movie editor, I should say, The thing is, um, you know, of course the professional level packages have lots

more capability. Yeah, there are a lot more features. So essentially the stuff that you get on your home computer, it's really the same sort of program that the professionals are using. It's just a dumbed down version, yeah, because most people don't simply don't need all of the the special effects and the ability to uh do a lot of color correction. UM. It's sort of like the difference in if you will photoshop elements versus the full version

of Photoshop. It's just it's got far fewer features. Uh. As a result, it's more affordable to the average can sumer. But you know, if it's something that you're considering, if you if this sounds interesting to you as a career, if you'd like to get into professional motion picture editing, UM, you know, you'd certainly get a feel of for what it's like using some of these uh, you know, more simple programs, and then you know you can perhaps invest in some education and try out some of the more

intense programs. I would recommend getting lots of hard drive space and a much more powerful processor. Right. You can never have too much RAM or processing capability or or hard drive space when you're doing this kind of work. Yep. And then you'll just go through the whole process of capturing the video from your from your recording device, whatever camera you're using, the editing process, and then rendering once you're done, and then you can go your Then you

got your movie. We just simplified a whole bunch of the projects. Rendering is easy. It takes no time at all. I expect Tyler to run in here any seconds, guys. Yeah, no, No. Rendering is what we call. That's the time when we walk into the video department and people are playing video games or reading books or throwing things at each other. They just turned to you and say we're rendering right now, and you accept it and you walk out of the room like it's okay. Yes. I tried that in my desk.

I said I'm writing right now, and that did not work at all. I can't imagine why. Well that that drives up a really good discussion about a video video movie editing. UM and again we've there's so much more to come to talk about, so we're going to put this research to good use, right right, Well, at some point we'll have plenty more episodes in the future, but like we said, we'll give you guys a break so that you don't have to get overwhelmed by a by

movie stuff too quickly. But if there's a specific topic you want us to talk about about movies, obviously we've talked about how we're going to discuss sound at some point and how they do that. Um, but yeah, I mean anything else, and maybe eventually we will do an episode just on the Red one. Yeah, you know, I'd really like to just because it's uh, you know, apparently uh the hot camera right now in the market. Yeah.

So yeah, if you have any of those questions you want to hear something specific about movie making or just

technology in general, you can write us. Our email address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon if you're a tech stuff and be sure to check us out on Twitter text Stuff hs wsr handle, and you can also find us on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash tech Stuff h s W for Mora on this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff Works dot com, and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the How Stuff Works homepage,

brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you