Video Editing on the Net
June 20, 2007 9:26 PM   Subscribe

Ten years ago, video editing (especially nonlinear editing) was the realm of professionals [youtube]. An Avid System cost close to a $100k or you could rent an editing suite by the hour. i-Movie, and mini-dv camcorders lowered the price barrier quite considerably. Times have changed. By 2007, all you need to cut video is flash. Will Youtube's new video editing application stir things up? Maybe Walter Murch ought to have a look.
posted by sswiller (30 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 


"An Avid System cost close to a $100k"

Source? I seem to recall having a decent Avid system setup at my school roughly 10 years ago, and I think it only cost about $5k. I imagine there being quite a difference in price between a professional system and a "prosumer" system, but $100k seems pretty damn high.

Also, it's iMovie, not i-Movie.
posted by patr1ck at 10:00 PM on June 20, 2007


The Youtube application is surprisingly robust, though it doesn't have the feature set of even an iMovie, let alone a Premiere/Final Cut/Avid. Getting clips into it would be a pain, the cutting tools seem rudimentary, and you can't separate audio from video or add your own audio. But still, pretty damned impressive for a Flash applet.
posted by chrominance at 10:16 PM on June 20, 2007


A former employer had Avid systems of that vintage, for a complete, high-end, large storage digital nonlinear offline editing system, 100k is totally believable.
posted by pupdog at 10:17 PM on June 20, 2007


No, Avids really did cost that much. It wasn't until Final Cut Pro started selling their systems for $1000 that Avid had to drop their prices so much.

I'm speaking of a Media Composer or a Film Composer, the full pro Avid systems. The Avid Express and Express DV were cheaper, but the full systems, circa 1995, say, were in the $100,000 range.
posted by MythMaker at 10:18 PM on June 20, 2007


Full Avid Systems did cost close to $100k. I don't know when they introduced their software only DV and Xpress version; I suppose it could have been ten years ago. If your school's system cost only $5k it would have been one of those lower end versions.
I wouldn't give iMovie the credit for stirring things up. That credit belongs to iMovies bigger brother, Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro dramatically brought down the cost of finishing broadcast quality material.
iMovie is great for little kids with firewire enabled cameras.
posted by matt_od at 10:19 PM on June 20, 2007


$7,000 or so for a "turn key avid dv editing system" from 2000. http://www.videomaker.com/article/7932/

The big systems at the time were also Video Toaster and Media 100s. In 1997 anyway, those were in the 5 grand section. And they were just additional hardware.

But those only did editing, not color correction, compositing, or other fancy things, so you could easily build an editing rig then that could cost upwards of 50 grand for what you can get away with now on a macbook pro and final cut studio 2, which is $3700 or so, and does a lot *more* than just cut video.

The youtube editor looks interesting, and it will be cool to see what some folks can make with it. But you are just cutting and editing h.264 compressed video optimized for the web, so the footage will 'fall apart' a lot quicker (multiple effects, crossfades, etc). I just poked at it and it appears to be more of an ad for Adobe Premiere Lite 4.56 or whatever, showing people what they can do with their footage and then "upgrade" to premiere.

And anyone on a Mac is already capturing in iMovie or Final Cut Studio / Express. Am I the only one who thinks Adobe is trying to figure out who the hell they are and what their market is (and by what i've seen of their custom installer for CS3, how to make sys admins hate them even more).
posted by mrzarquon at 10:25 PM on June 20, 2007


fwiw: im an apple / final cut / xsan geek. So you can still make a $100,000 video editing suite easily, you can just have 5 people working on it at the same time.
posted by mrzarquon at 10:28 PM on June 20, 2007


This is very cool. It will be interesting to see on YouTube what people do with this tool, and we will see it here, the good, the bad and the meh, as MeFi loves itself some YouTubery.
posted by caddis at 10:30 PM on June 20, 2007


Yes, the YouTube application doesn't have as many features as iMovie but iMovie doesn't have as many features as a professional Avid system. What we can observe then is more people using less features.
posted by Shakeer at 10:36 PM on June 20, 2007


Wow. I remember learning to cut on a Steenbeck.

I've always wondered how learning on something like FCP or Avid -- or, god forbid, iMovie -- affects the way your brain approaches the editing process. Working on a Steenbeck, I had to know exactly what I was going to do and how I was going to do it. When I use Final Cut, I can afford to experiment a lot more.

I think all of this is totally awesome, by the way.
posted by hifiparasol at 11:09 PM on June 20, 2007


If they can cut Munich on a Moviola...
posted by basicchannel at 12:34 AM on June 21, 2007


The real revolution was Windows Movie Maker. (wich is still the most used software by the youtubers - you can spot a video done with WMM from the crappy video effects and text overlays).

Not that there's anything bad with softwares like WMM or the youtube applet: if your good and you happen to know a little about montage you can do with them wonderful things.
posted by darkripper at 4:00 AM on June 21, 2007


"An Avid System cost close to a $100k"

Back in 1995 I was the first user of my university's Avid computer video editing system. The cost came from the massive hard disks needed, more than anything else, along with the amount of RAM needed. It was also all Mac based, so you had to pay the Mac tax. I couldn't tell you what spec it had.

The system was so expensive that it was shared ownership between two different departments. I had to get permission from both departments to use it, despite the fact that most people were scared of it and it had lain dormant for the two months since it had been installed. It was packed into a room the size of a closet.

I found it a dream to use and I understood its concepts very easily. I didn't even read the instruction manual. I had a little training from an engineer and picked the rest up. I was filmed for a BBC documentary at the time and they said they were in the process of investigating computer-based video editing...

Now, of course, I would expect the same university to have nothing but computer editing. In fact, I except the kids edit their projects using their own notebook computers. Man, times have changed. People tell me that students drive around in cars nowadays! Cars!
posted by humblepigeon at 4:30 AM on June 21, 2007


But Andrew Keen says this will be the end of Western Civilization and that we will drown in our own mediocrity?
posted by rzklkng at 5:29 AM on June 21, 2007


We do a lot of work with post-production in the Detroit area. Avid is by no means an anachronism in the professional world - for HD work, for any kind of professional editing, you still need the tools, and the hand of a seasoned professional that understands them, to distinguish yourself as a high-quality house.
These tools are really cool for non-pros - but Avid still rules.
posted by disclaimer at 5:33 AM on June 21, 2007


Avid's fall-from-grace came from the same place as Quark's. They had created the industry standard and thought that was enough. Then they started to ignore their users, and someone else came along to poach their customers.
posted by drezdn at 5:55 AM on June 21, 2007 [2 favorites]


I've been hoping someone is going to do something like this ever since seeing Brendan Dawes' psycho studio in 1999, but this doesn't look as good as jumpcut.

That said, the first one to offer the chance to download the edit to a local drive could end up as the real winner, and the development of jumpcut seems to have stalled with the yahoo buyout. Until you get a download option, I suspect people are going to carry on buying software.
posted by unless I'm very much mistaken at 6:09 AM on June 21, 2007


Does it have star wipes? If it doesn't have star wipes, I'm not interested.

Honestly, though, editing video on the web sounds like my version of hell, but if it brings video editing to a new batch of people, I can't hate on it too much.
posted by LordSludge at 6:40 AM on June 21, 2007


As a professional editor I have worked on many different systems. I view them all as different hammers used to hit the same nail. The hammer does not know what you are trying to build. It is always the person wielding the hammer that makes the difference.
posted by DaddyNewt at 6:42 AM on June 21, 2007 [3 favorites]


There's a pretty big difference between what you can cut in an online video editor (~40 kilobits/sec), iMovie (~25 megabits/sec) and a high-end Avid system or Final Cut on a honkin' new MP Mac (~90 megabits/sec and then some).
posted by eatyourlunch at 6:52 AM on June 21, 2007


Any other MeFites using AviSynth?
posted by aaronetc at 7:51 AM on June 21, 2007


As a found footage filmmaking aficionado, and a researcher in the medium, the contemporary explosion in democratic access to reconfiguration technologies is something I observe with intent interest. Forget thinking back to the Avid, Esfir Shub made the first film comprised of previously extant material in the 1900s, by hand, at the expense of thousands of hours in selection from the archive. Now you just scrub and slice. It should be _the_ way we interact with the dominant media, yet the p2p, streaming video, capturing and editing technologies that are all so widely adopted are failing, in my view, to yield the significant political thrust I for one expected. More effort or attention in the creation of a subversive and avant-garde piece, be it Tribulation 99, Spin, or Atomic Cafe, seems to correlate with critical and artistic merit. On YouTube et al, it's all shits and giggles, cultural ironies and fanboy stuff. Appropriation and reconfiguration of media is an empowering and defining method to react to the hegemony represented in it. But it seems like the ff works created now are primarily excerpts or other manner of straight-through reiteration. I hope to still fashion my first FPP as a look at the question: Is the feed all we need?
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 7:58 AM on June 21, 2007 [1 favorite]


I tried YouTube's remixer last night and I don't see how it's any better than Windows Movie Magic, which serves my purposes at the moment but I'm aware it's below the curve. I can do better but I'm just learning at the moment. Problem with YouTube's thing is you have to upload everything to it, even your roughs. There's stuff on my hard drive I'd rather not let everyone on YouTube see - mistakes and outtakes. So I'd essentially have to edit stuff to put it on YouTube, then edit it again to actually make something on YouTube. Why not just do everything right the first time?

YouTube recently changed the page where you detemine if a vid can be seen by just your friends or by everybody. It was working fine and then a few days ago it won't save the private list part. If I mark it private, essentially I'm the only one who can see it. I can't click the checkboxes anymore. I appreciate their constantly improving their site, but I just wish they'd doublecheck their work.
posted by ZachsMind at 8:52 AM on June 21, 2007


In the early to mid '90s, I had a friend who was going to school for video editing, I remember him sending me video tapes of different projects he was working on, and how bad ass it was to work on these giant and powerful Avid systems.

Over the years his work got better and better, he started to incorporate more complicated effects and was beginning to really get a handle on CG.

Then I didn't hear from him for about a year. When he next came home to visit his folks for Christmas, he stopped over and solemnly revealed to me that his entire world had changed.

He opened his Mac and showed me Final Cut Pro.

"I can do it all at home now. I don't even have to go into the lab..."

After all the years of him describing working on Avid systems, seeing it's spiritual equivalent running on a laptop was pretty impressive.
posted by quin at 10:04 AM on June 21, 2007


I have to plug my fellow swedes at Jaycut. Almost world wide buzz since the beta launch last year and then the poor bastards went out of beta just as YouTube launched their Remixer.
(I don't know if it's better, I just felt kinda sorry for them).
posted by mr.marx at 10:47 AM on June 21, 2007


um, Avid systems can still cost 100,000. A fully outfitted full HD Adrenaline suite with dual monitors and an additional pro quality HD CRT preview monitor, sound board, studio quality audio monitors and Unity storage will easily run into that price range if not higher. It'll go much higher if you start adding more peripherals on, like vector scopes and the like.

Avid still has a strong grip on the pro market despite that price range, because all that money buys you capability to do anything you want and the ability to conform to any standard or deliverables requirement someone can throw at you combined with an entire industry of professionals who know the ins and outs of your hardware and software like the back of their hand, such as editors, video engineers, assistant editors and finishers. But Final Cut is making serious strides in almost no time because that capability I mentioned is still possible for much less money spent on the base software and breakout boxes. But a lot of that cost difference lies in the fact that you can get away, in final cut, without all that extra hardware capability. Now that so much stuff is done with firewire or SDI and AES/EBU, you find more budget suites that don't have sound boards. Or you'll find they don't have vector scopes because their finishers can get the job done with the software ones in final cut. (many finishers wouldn't want to, but I've met some who will if they have to.) But on the other hand, you can find final cut suites hooked up with Xserve fiber channel storage solutions and huge preview monitors and expensive sound mixing boards and audio monitors that'll run you in the tens of thousands, too, because a lot of that extra cost wasn't for the software alone in the first place. The BIG thing that Avid did that brought down their price was they SERIOUSLY expanded their line of software only licenses. Now you can get Media Composer (!) as a software only purchase, not to mention all the desktop oriented variations they offer as well.
posted by shmegegge at 11:20 AM on June 21, 2007


I remember back when I started editing, Avids got their first 9 gig drives. It was a big as a breadbox and as loud as a machinist shop. Nine gigs! we thought. What if it breaks? We'll have to redigitize all that material!

These days, I'm more into FCP. It's like half the price, more features, easier to update. You don't need to dedicate your computer to editing only (most Avid houses won't connect their windows machines to the internet because they can't put on the latest service packs without screwing everything up.) And in some ways, it feels like Avid just gave up. They don't even fix bugs any more.

The only trouble is getting all the old Avid people used to a new system. But all the new young editors are all about FCP. Walter Murch too!

BTW real men used an Editdroid or a Montage Picture Processor. Banks of 24 laserdisk players or tape decks! Hot!
posted by fungible at 12:23 PM on June 21, 2007


I've been editing (mainly) video for more than 30 years now, and yeah, all the new non-linear stuff sure makes my job a LOT easier, and as hifiparasol, DaddyNewt and fungible have more or less pointed out, gear is one thing, but that doesn't mean you're an editor.

I remember working for a large corporate studio when a bunch of the then-new betacam gear was coming in.

Me and a bunch of other post production types were looking at it, and someone said, "A lot more knobs."

And one of on-line editors replied, "Yeah, a lot of knobs, but so what? We can teach chimps to fly goddamn spacecraft, we can teach anyone what buttons to push on an editing system. Knowing what buttons to push doesn't make you an editor."
posted by Relay at 1:08 PM on June 21, 2007


You'd have to seriously hate yourself to edit anything more than the family vacation in iMovie.

Seriously, you can get scissors and a scotch tape cheap too, but you wouldn't want to edit with that either. Well, not video anyway.
posted by davros42 at 3:16 PM on June 21, 2007


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