MetaFilter posts tagged with editing

Is this your homework, Larry?

Jon_Evil — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 16:57:05 -0800

The research, literary, and copy editors of Vanity Fair go to town on Sarah Palin's resignation speech.
seeing as nearly everyone I talked to at the 10th meetup was an editor of some kind, you'll all get a kick out of this

Paul Graham Writes An Essay

forwebsites — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:08:29 -0800

Paul Graham recently wrote an essay. And saved all his edits, so you can replay it in entirety just as he wrote it.* It's quite fascinating to see if you ever wondered how he (or other writers) went about their job. And here's the Hacker News thread he initiated. This can be a very useful tool to watch and understand your own writing process, or understand and help your students write. Like cvs/svn mirror for long form writing. * - make sure that you don't let the link hang in the background and come to it after 15 minutes, because by then the essay would have replayed through the edits and look like a bland text page. The controls at the top are a bit non-intuitive if you don't know what you are looking for. I tripped up, so I thought I'd warn others.

Buying a scalpel set doesn't make you a surgeon, but...

cthuljew — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:03:33 -0800

Not all of us need, or want, $10,000 worth of Adobe and Microsoft software to be creative. So, here's some alternatives, each available on every major platform:

GIMP, for all your drawing and photo-editing needs. (Windows and OSX.)
Inkscape, for vector graphics creation.
Scribus, for incredibly powerful document creation.
FontForge, if you want to make your own fonts.
OpenOffice, the old standby for word processing, spreadsheets, and all those other office needs. I'm a personal fan of Inkscape for its wonderfully intuitive interface, as well as Scribus for its stylesheet-based power. I hope these links improve your productivity, instead of ruining it for the day.

Break it down, Martin! Yo, I'm tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-try-try-try-try-tryin' to.

Ambrosia Voyeur — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:44:34 -0800

Cinemnesis, filmmaker Martin Arnold's 41 minute compilation of the films of his "compulsive repetition" trilogy, is available to you online. The quality is lacking, small details are missed, but I thought you'd enjoy these nonetheless. Time codes for the three pieces and more inside. "The cinema of Hollywood is a cinema of exclusion, reduction and denial, a cinema of repression. There is always something behind that which is being represented, which was not represented. And it is exactly that that is most interesting to consider." pièce touchée, 1989 passage á l'acte, 1993. Begins at about 15:15 Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy, 1998. Begins at about 26:40. Alone is, apparently, the one with the broadest appeal. Try it first if you don't like the beginning of pièce touchée. His new(er) installation work, Deanimated, is the screening of the The Invisible Ghost, a Bela Lugosi picture, with a flawless removal of selected characters throughout, lending it a perplexing and uproarious sense of haunted emptiness. He does not own a Tivo. I asked.

Profile of a Profile

defenestration — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 18:14:08 -0800

Storyboard is an almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. The Birth of Storyboard is a (minimally edited) video of the conversation that spawned the project. The feature—that will be published in November—is about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. In the past he has woven the process of creating his work into the work itself, so Wired writer Jason Tanz thought it would make sense to do the same. Looking to promote his directorial debut, Kaufman has agreed to take part in the project.

Let's Step Outside

The Card Cheat — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:21:41 -0800

Who ruined the Hollywood fight scene? With average shot length under six seconds and falling, are fight scenes more exciting than they used to be? Or is Hollywood's love of fast editing cutting us short? Critic David Bordwell also wrote a couple of interesting blog posts on this subject, with The Bourne Ultimatum as their focus.

What I Really Want Is To Direct

optovox — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:40:24 -0800

The films of Joel and Ethan Coen. The films of Tim Burton. The films of Stanley Kubrick.

Get Your Red Pens Ready.

laconic titan — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:48:26 -0800

Zip up that dangling modifier--it's National Grammar Day! Let the ranting begin...

Black History Month

hadjiboy — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:57:45 -0800

Time Magazine's 25 Most Important Films On Race

Directors Behaving Badly

hadjiboy — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 03:40:37 -0800

The Cheating of Salim Baba [video | projector]

B s f t e W b + e t o h e = The full picture

Gyan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:25:52 -0800

Essential Video Resources - primers, guides and links for the video editor and technician Of particular interest were 1)A Quick Guide to Digital Video Resolution and Aspect Ratio Conversions 2)the DV FAQ

Proof that Led Zeppelin fans are geekier than Rush fans

melorama — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 18:28:52 -0800

Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same motion picture soundtrack, reverse engineered. To commemorate Monday's remixed 5.1 Surround double-disc DVD/HD-DVD/BluRay/CD reissue of Led Zeppelin's 1976 film, The Song Remains the Same, we present you with The Garden Tapes, a Zapruder-esque analysis of every song from the soundtrack and film recordings.

“Please do the necessary things to stop production of the book.”

sock it to me monkey — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:51:18 -0800

"“If the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.” The New York Times reported today that Raymond Carver's widow, Tess Gallagher, is pushing to republish the stories in Carver's acclaimed 1981 breakout collection, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," in their original, unedited form. Carver's editor at the time, Gordon Lish, is acknowledged to have aggressively edited many stories this collection almost to the point of "a wholesale rewrite." The two examples provided of endings before and after the Lish edits [pdf; see pgs 5-7] raise unsettling questions.

Thompson's Glitch-Folk Debut

digaman — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:47:29 -0800

"I want those two minutes of my life back." Musique concrète Fred Thompson-style -- a merciless videohack of the candidate's performance at the GOP debate on MSNBC, October 9, 2007. While almost anyone can be made to look foolish edited this way, not everyone was impressed by Thompson's unedited presence at the debate, his TV debut as a presidential contender. Some believe, however, that the former Law and Order D.A. is just the man to "restore the Republican Party to Reagan's default settings."

Video Editing on the Net

sswiller — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:26:51 -0800

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.

Golden Ratios

digaman — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 08:21:30 -0800

Did the roof of the Pantheon influence Copernicus? Are the planets of the solar system aligned in accordance with a nearly-forgotten hypothesis known (unfairly) as Bode's Law? A fascinating wide-ranging discussion on BLDGBLOG with Walter Murch, the visionary editor and sound designer for such films as The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, THX1138, and many others. [Murch's film work has previously been discussed here and here.]

cut here

vronsky — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:36:21 -0800

The Cutting Edge - The Magic of Movie Editing BBC documentary on the technique and art of editing film. With commentary from Scorscese, Spielberg, and many more. Google vid.

Display your typing and editing

tellurian — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:11:52 -0800

dlog is a new document visualization system that attempts to show writing not as a static document but a progression of frames over time. I find the suspense of the process mesmerising/delightful. I'm surprised it hasn't been trashed.

Much Murch

Iridic — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 11:38:44 -0800

The visual interplay of helicopters and fan blades in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. The idiot-future soundscapes in THX-1138. The concept for the baptism montage in The Godfather. The actual cut of the "Director's Cut" of Touch of Evil. The man responsible for all of these is Walter Murch, one of the greatest film and sound editors of all time. More Inside.

I[][']m defina[a][i]tely going to used[d] this[][][found on del.icio.us/popular]

grumblebee — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 19:05:21 -0800

I like to write in a plain-text editor, and I've finally found a way to track edits! I've just started col[][l]aborating on a k[k]new book. This si[i][y]stem will come in handy. [][][thanks, Internet!]

VULTURES ATTACK FUNERAL AND EAT THE CORPSE!

languagehat — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 11:24:21 -0800

You remember Hunter, right? Sure you do. So does Robert Love, who had the distinct if difficult privilege of editing him.

What Hunter is justly celebrated for, among his other virtues, is his authorial voice, his truest creation, as powerful and unique a voice as exists in American letters. But this instrument, as his editors knew, existed only on paper. Those poor souls who booked him for public speaking gigs found that out soon enough. But Hunter’s authorial voice was perhaps at its purest and most potent in the memos and marked-up manuscript pages that came through the wires late at night and were waiting for us in neat little piles in the fax machine[...] Asked for a touch more detail in this sentence from the Elko piece “For many hours I tossed and turned . . . ,” he came back with “like a crack baby in a cold hallway.”

Enjoy. (Via Incoming Signals.)

The UK has the best advertisements.

bigtimes — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 13:59:35 -0800

Tim Thornton-Allan is a film editor who's collaborated with the best advertising and short film directors around the world.

Some other favorites: Cherry, Arcade, and Hong Kong

The Corrections

matteo — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 11:15:50 -0800

The Grammarian. Miss Gould, as she was known to everyone at the New Yorker, died last week, at the age of eighty-seven. She worked at the magazine for fifty-four years, most of them as its Grammarian (a title invented for her). A typical “Gould proof” was filled with the lightly pencilled tracery of her objections, suggestions, and abbreviated queries: “emph?” “ind.,” “mean this?”. Writes David Remnick: "She confronted the galley proofs of writers as various as Joseph Mitchell, J. D. Salinger, Janet Flanner--well, everyone, really.". More inside.

ResumeWiki: Pad your resume with strangers on the Internet

McGuillicuddy — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 19:45:40 -0800

ResumeWiki is a community edited resume centre. You post your profile (goals, etc) and assume the community of peers will give you comments and possible edits. Their ResumeWriting section has some interesting links, and could be the place to stay up caught up on HR snobbery.

I uppercased K.D. Lang’s name in a story... and it felt good.

chicobangs — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:36:52 -0800

Testy Copy Editors is a site run by WaPo Financial Copy Editor Philip Blanchard, with guest columns and discussions dedicated to blowing off steam for people in the occasionally tense business of making words fit, parse properly and make sense in print.

If you've actually edited copy under a deadline, or know someone who has, you know how thankless the job can sometimes be.