In the blink of an eye
Comprises a revised second edition of film editor Walter Murch's thought-provoking essay on the art and process of film editing. Originally published in 1992, revisions take new technologies such as digital editing into account. c. Book News Inc.
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- > The worst part of incorrect refresh rates for me is on panning footage and you get those janky blocky tears in the image.
That sounds a lot more like rolling shutter artifacts than 3:2 pulldown. What kind of camera are you using? Are you shooting with a CMOS sensor?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter
> This sounds like something I've heard from people with a head full of fun stuff talking about the space between the notes. There have bee times where that absolutely makes sense, but I'm at a loss on your time between frames.
Haha, fair enough. If you ever feel like diving in yourself, I passionately recommend In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Blink_of_an_Eye_(Murc...
- Fantastic article. It aligns with my experience that books can be more useful than video tutorials at teaching you how to create interesting videos. The author did great work to include so many video examples of the ideas too.
The author referenced YouTube videos, but I find that books are still even better than paid Udemy videos for developing an intuition on how to make an interesting video. Though YouTube/Udemy tutorials can be great at teaching you how to use editing software, experienced filmmakers who write books are often better at expressing how they built an intuition for when to use a particular edit at a particular time.
Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye" (2005) recommended by the author is definitely a great read. I thought it was a great insight that cuts are best when you would naturally want to blink. For a short video, I used the advice once to place cut between scenes when a beat in the background music hit, shortly after a natural pause in a narrative voiceover.
Stockman's "How to Shoot Video That Doesn't Suck" (2011) is also a great introduction, which helped me competently film a few videos as a volunteer for non-profits that my colleagues were very happy with. It taught me the fundamentals of making a good educational or trailer-style video that don't relate to software. For example, I learned to film solid, non-shaky shots, to bring the camera close to the speakers, to generally avoid shots longer than 10 seconds, and to take special care to record high-quality audio with a microphone off the camera. This might be very basic advice for people experienced with video, but I remembered having trouble watching videos by people in university, who filmed pretty, creative shots, but recorded dialogue that was hard to understand with poor audio quality.
Video tutorials definitely have a place—I would have struggled a lot more to understand Adobe AfterEffects and Premiere Pro without them—but I would say that books are even more fundamental. It's very possible that an entry-level videographer can produce an engaging video by knowing the fundamentals from books and just Windows Movie Maker or iMovie (sticking to basic cuts), as a great edits can happen without more advanced video editing software.
- I am a filmmaker. I went to film school. Maybe that has something to do with it?
I cannot recommend enough a book called In The Blink Of An Eye by Walter Murch.
- Probably the most brilliant contributor to the art of sound design is a guy called Walter Murch. He's somewhat of a polymath in film, as he not only designed the sound for The Godather trilogy and Apocalypse Now, but he also edited the picture.
Anyway, Murch put a lot of his thoughts about both editing and sound into a book called 'In the Blink of an Eye', which is still read by film students today. One passage that always stuck with me is an informal rule that Murch gave himself after he discovered something odd about the interplay between sound and audience immersion. After a lot of experimentaiton, Murch found that in any 'moment' of a film (say 3 - 7 seconds), an audience can only process 2-3 layers of sound playing at once.
For example, Michael Corleone goes to meet Moe Greene and they're walking through the lobby. We hear footsteps, the elevator ding, and the atmos of the hotel. If Murch had added the sound of he luggage of the bell-boys or some guests arguing in the rooms, it would be too overwhelming for us and the verisimilitude of the film would become compromised.
I guess I'm mentioning Murch because this informal sound rule was always independent of speech from the actors, which he doesn't treat as a layer of sound. To me, this may be a very practical example of what these researchers seem to be finding: that there is indeed some parallel processing going on with speech and sound in our auditory cortex.
- "In the Blink of an Eye" by Walter Murch (sound and editing on Apocalypse Now, Godfather, the Conversation, and so many more). The book is about film editing but actually about how humans absorb information.
- As a film editor, and admittedly a Walter Murch fanboy, I still partially agree with your argument. I think, however, Murch is getting at something deeper here that he needs to elaborate on. I'm an Ebert fan as well, but you're comparing a critic to an engineer.
Real quick, this Citizen Kane bit is misleading. Welles's use of rack focus was noteworthy, but it was his use of deep focus that was the true wonder. It is much more noteworthy and famous, and possibly what you are meaning to refer to. It was a feat of engineering and lighting at the time, and not at all a paradigm shift as much as notch on the linear progression of film engineering.
Murch really did write the book on film editing. In The Blink Of An Eye is a short and to-the-point text book on film editing, an offers a simple theory as to why it works, which can be figured by the title. The theory seemed too simple to me the way he explained it, but I've come to understand he essentially means that film cuts are not jolting because we are used to blinking. Whether he is correct or not, the nuance of this understanding would basically argue there is a threshold for which the jolt could be overridden by an evolved necessity for being able to blink (and possibly other similar less-than-linear occurances in optical living).
Murch goes on, in the book, to apply this theory and he argues that elements such as narrative, beauty, concept and other cognitive intrigue can widen the threshold. All in all, he makes the what is probably the best argument so far for how and why the engineering of filmmaking magic works.
His book is the seminal textbook on film editing and worshiped by filmmakers generation after generation for it's timeless truths, because these truths offer a simple way for filmmakers to make decisions in their craft. They don't encroach on any style or technical achievement. Despite the practical delivery, they are essentially theoretical psychology.
He also pioneered digital editing.
I don't believe Murch is immune to Clarke's first law, but he is no Ebert. Murch is no critic. He is an engineer, and while this post doesn't get into the specifics, his claims here are supported in his battle-tested texts.
