Non-Linear Editing and the Compression of Time

Editing video on a computer used to be called non-linear, as distinguished from editing on film media, or even running one VCR and recording on another. Using two video tape players was how I began video editing. Non-linear means one can assemble and re-assemble an edit in any sequence. Those were the days, about a decade ago, when I plunged into editing video on a computer.

Since then, we got high definition consumer video. Time passed by my mini-DV tape camcorder, my Apple G5 computer, and the state-of-the-art Apple Final Cut editing software on which I edited probably fifty to a hundred different programs. I stopped taking video. I put off upgrading to high definition knowing that it entailed a new camera, a new computer, new editing software, a Blu-Ray drive, new DVD and Blu-Ray authoring software, and the learning curves to figure them all out.

Four months ago, my niece asked me to videotape her wedding. I took the plunge and bought a new high definition camera, the subject of an earlier blog post. Fumbling with its controls, I managed to get about an hour and a half of video. Returning home, I thought I would go back to Windows since I already had a relatively new Windows laptop. My first non-linear editing program, way back when, was Adobe Premiere on a Windows machine, so I thought I would give the current version, admittedly, the basic Elements version, a chance. That proved too frustrating, so I decided to return to Apple editing. Hence my new iMac and the current Final Cut Pro X.

Technology has changed in a decade, much to my frustration. I used to be able to assemble an edit from multiple clips in a few minutes. That was non-linear editing. Now, the powers that be at Apple have created a "magnetic" timeline which cannot be turned off. It automatically inserts, arranges and shifts clips. What used to be non-linear has reverted back to linear.

That is the state of today's software. It's too automatic. Fortunately, I found a YouTube video showing how one can fill the magnetic timeline with a slug then proceed to non-linearly assemble clips.

Edits done, I proceeded to use four different DVD authoring programs (three on the iMac and, after transferring huge files on a thumb-drive, one on my Windows laptop) and various different settings to burn DVD's in about a dozen different ways. I felt like Thomas Edison experimenting with hundreds of different materials for filaments before he came up with a working light bulb. High definition my foot. Different burns competed with each other for the most miserable picture quality, complete with pixelation and artifacts. I began to get depressed about the project and put it aside.

I thought to myself that perhaps I should just stick to a Blu-Ray product. I burned my first Blu-Ray disc and, thank goodness, the picture quality on our television was gorgeous. The thing is, we hardly ever use our Blu-Ray player. Even when we rent videos, we go for DVD instead of Blu-Ray. There are two reasons. First, we only have two HDMI (high definition) input plugs in the back of our television and they are used for the DirectTV dish and for AppleTV (i.e., Netflix). I tried using an HDMI splitter, but it doesn't work on our TV. I am not going to buy a new TV just to get an extra HDMI input, and reaching in back of our existing TV with a flashlight to switch connections is a pain in the neck. The second reason is that DVD quality looks very nice on our big TV, almost as good as Blu-Ray.

In my technological malaise, I thought maybe I could transfer my edits to my old Mac. After all, both machines are Apple products (although my G5 is pre-Intel chip). To cut what is already a long story a bit shorter, here is what I had to do: (i) I exported (the current terminology is "share") my edited product by converting the 1080x1920 resolution to 720x480 DV, being careful to not to chose the anamorphic version. Anamorphic was my first attempt and the image was squashed a bit. I hate squashed video images. (ii) Because a 64 Gbyte thumb drive that works on a new iMac cannot be read by my old G5, I copied the humongous file onto my Windows laptop. This was the key to my success. (iii) I reformatted the thumb drive to the old Windows NTFS format, then copied the humongous file back onto the thumb drive. (iv) I loaded the file onto my old G5. Oddly enough, it worked.

Now for the second punchline. I have already exposed the meaning of the "Non-Linear" title to this post. The other theme to this story is the value of patience. It takes a lot of time to compress a video file so it fits onto a DVD. If it is done well, it means going back and forth several times sampling the individual frames to know where pixels can be compressed. The more movement in the images, the less compression.

If you look up comparisons of DVD and Blu-Ray authoring programs on the internet, you will notice that the reviewers place considerable value on a software's ability to do it quickly. It took only about a half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes for all my previous DVD attempts to compress and burn. Every product was wretched. On my old G5 Mac and its good old iDVD software (the freebie and sophisticated DVD authoring program that is no longer supported by Apple or even capable of running on new Apple machines), it took about six hours.

The product? Very nice, thank you. One ought not sacrifice quality for time.

Jumps & Spins, the Video

The deeper technological and philosophical question is preservation. What formats and media will survive the passage of time? Over the course of a scant decade, optical media have become passé. How does one watch video nowadays? YouTube? Smart phones? What about the future? In the world of still photography, JPG and TIFF files are reasonably universal, but there is no such standardization for video. [Witness my frustration getting two video clips visible on this blog post.] How can we archive video so it can be enjoyed decades later?

 
8mm film from Australia, about 1965

Does anyone have an 8mm movie projector?