Editing On Films Is Now Being Done On Computers

Like any modern professional, Naomi Geraghty took her laptop with her when she went on a business trip in January. The machine got a lot of use -- but not just for email.

1月份出差时，娜奥米•杰拉蒂(Naomi Geraghty)带上了她的笔记本电脑──跟时下所有专业人员一样。她的电脑有很多用途，不仅仅是收发电子邮件。

Ms. Geraghty is a film editor and was spending 10 days at the Irish coastal² home of Terry George, director of 'Reservation Road,' starring Joaquin Phoenix³, which opened across the U.S. last week. Mr. George couldn't travel for the editing, so Ms. Geraghty loaded a copy of Avid⁴ editing software on her Apple PowerBook and went to him.

杰拉蒂是一名电影剪辑师，这次出差的目的地是《救赎之路》(Reservation Road)一片的导演特里•乔治(Terry George)在爱尔兰的海滨别墅，时间为10天。由于乔治没办法远行，杰拉蒂只好带着已经安装了Avid编辑软件的苹果PowerBook来找他。这部影片最近在全美上映，华金•费尼克斯(Joaquin Phoenix)在里面扮演角色。

Most people have a mental image of film editors hunched⁵ in the dark over editing consoles with lengths of film pinned to the wall behind them. These days, they sit at computers, moving scenes around as easily as paragraphs in a word processor.

提到电影剪辑师，大多数人对他们的印象是：猫在某个昏暗角落的操作台旁，长长的胶片钉在身后的墙上。如今的剪辑师却是坐在电脑桌前，他们在屏幕上移动画面就像用文字处理软件挪动段落那么轻松。

Video files are so demanding, editing computers used to cost tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of dollars. But as Ms. Geraghty's tale suggests, even relatively⁶ low-end personal computers, laptops included, are now so powerful that Hollywood pros⁷ have joined student filmmakers and indies in taking advantage of them.

由于视频文件对电脑配置的要求很高，用来剪辑的电脑过去动辄几万甚至几十万美元一台。而现在，即使相对低端的个人电脑，包括笔记本，都已经非常强大。于是，好莱坞的电影专业人士纷纷加入学生制片人和独立制片人的行列，用起个人电脑──杰拉蒂就是一个典型例子。

It's one more example -- along with music recording⁸ and graphic⁹ design -- of the way cheap computers are blurring¹⁰ the distinction between professional and amateur tools. Not that just having software makes you good at something, as a quick trip around the Web makes clear.

这个趋势再次说明廉价电脑正在淡化专业工具和业余工具之间的界限，这一点在音乐录制和图形设计领域已经得到体现。但只要在网路上转一转就会发现，仅仅有了软件还不足以成为高手。

Ms. Geraghty says that while she enjoys the comfort of her regular editing studio, a notebook is not without its charms. 'I could look out over a fishing harbor,' she says. 'It was the best view I've ever had from a cutting room.'

杰拉蒂说，虽然在常规剪辑工作室里感觉很舒适，但使用笔记本工作也别有一番情趣。“从窗户望出去，渔港美景近在眼前，这是过去我在剪辑室内从未享受过的，”她说。

Like 'Reservation Road,' the typical Hollywood feature film these days is an analog-digital hybrid¹¹. Reels of film might be developed at a lab such as Technicolor, but then $1.5 million scanners digitize them and put them on a $100 generic¹² USB hard drive. From there, it's on to the editors.

如今，一般的好莱坞故事片都是以模拟－数字混合方式制作的，《救赎之路》就是其中之一。一卷卷胶片在Technicolor这样的工作室冲洗出来之后，扫描仪（售价高达150万美元）会对其进行数字化，保存在100美元的普通USB硬碟上，然后才进入剪辑环节。

Editing on computers is so much easier than editing physical film that it's how nearly all movies are now cut. USC's film school once had 50 editing consoles; now it has only two. Indeed, editing may have become too easy. 'You can easily recut your movie 10 times a day,' says Matt Furie, who teaches editing at USC. 'Some students go off the deep end and cut, cut, cut. We tell them they need to discipline themselves to push away from the desk, drop the mouse and just think.'

剪辑数字影片比剪辑胶片要简单得多，如今差不多所有电影都是用电脑剪辑的。USC电影学校原来有50台剪辑工作台，现在已经缩减为两台了。的确，剪辑可能变得太容易了。“你一天甚至能剪辑10次，”在USC教授剪辑的马特•富里(Matt Furie)说。“有些学生大刀阔斧地剪、剪、剪，我们总是提醒他们要控制自己，暂时离开桌子，放下鼠标，什么都不做，静静地思考。”

Like others, Mr. Furie suggests that one of the reasons there are so many rapid-fire cuts in today's movies is that editing software has made them so simple to do.

正如很多专业人士指出的那样，富里表示，目前出现大量剪辑粗糙的影片的原因正是在于编辑软件使得剪辑工作变得异常轻松。

Editors are lucky in that theirs is one of the few industries with intense software competition. Anyone paying attention to computers the past 20 years will understand its dynamics¹³.

剪辑人员是幸运的，因为电影业是为少数几个软件竞争激烈的行业之一。关注过去20年电脑发展的人对软件的蓬勃生机应该深有体会。

Avid, of Tewksbury, Mass., is the long-established leader. Your average Academy Award winner typically is cut on an Avid. The company was one of the first in the field, and designed its software to work the way editors were used to working. For example, Avid's programs, like most software, use folders¹⁴. But they're called 'bins,' after the canvas bags into which editors used to toss small lengths of film.

马萨诸塞州企业Tewksbury开发的Avid是在业内具有重要地位的一款软件，奥斯卡奖获影片基本上都是用Avid剪辑的。该公司是电影剪辑软件领域数一数二的企业，善于按照剪辑人员习惯的工作方式来设计软件。比如，Avid的程序跟大部分软件一样都使用文件夹，不过它们不叫“文件夹”，而叫“文件箱”，图标是帆布袋──过去的剪辑人员就是把短小的胶片扔进帆布袋里。

Avid software does just about anything you could ask -- for a price. The company's flagship Media Composer package runs $5,000. Philip Hodgetts, who follows the industry for Creative Planet, says Avid has an epic¹⁵ fight on its hands from newer, lower-cost alternatives. Apple sells Final Cut Studio for $1,300, while Adobe's Premiere Pro¹ is just $800.

Avid基本上能满足你的任何要求，在价钱上自然也毫不含糊。该公司的旗舰产品Media Composer套装软件售价5,000美元。为Creative Planet跟踪该行业的菲利普•霍杰茨(Philip Hodgetts)指出，Avid一直在顽强抵抗那些新推出的低成本同类产品的巨大压力。苹果公司(Apple)的Final Cut Studio售价1,300美元，而奥多比系统公司(Adobe)的Premiere Pro只卖800美元。

While film still is central in big Hollywood features, it's unclear how long it will be before even the biggest feature movies go all-digital. The buzz in technical movie-making circles these days involves the two-month-old, ultra-high-resolution digital Red camera. Boosters say it looks nearly as good as 35mm film -- and costs around $30,000, or about the same as renting a 35mm camera for 10 days.

目前胶片电影在好莱坞大片中仍然占核心地位，但不清楚有朝一日连最大型的故事片是否也会变成全数字的。最近电影制作技术领域一个引人关注的事件是刚上市只有两个月的超高分辨率数字摄像机Red camera。拥趸们表示，Red camera几乎跟35毫米摄像机一样出色，售价在3万美元左右，相当于租用35毫米摄像机10天的费用。

Thanks to cheap computers, a similar sort of creative destruction is happening everywhere in the industry. Color adjustment used to require expensive oscilloscope-like monitors. It first moved to specialized¹⁶ -- and expensive -- software, but lately it's done with relatively low-cost (say, $200) 'plug-ins' by companies like Red Giant Software.

得益于廉价电脑的进步，类似这样的“创造性破坏”正在电影行业的各个角落里发生。色彩校正原先要求使用昂贵的类似示波镜的显示器，后来转向价格不菲的专业软件，但到了不久前，在电脑上使用Red Giant Software等公司设计的相对低成本的插件（比如200美元）就能够完成了。

Angus Wall, editor of 'Zodiac,' a film released earlier this year, says the real impact of all of this digitization is to bring simplicity¹⁷ and artistic¹⁸ control back to the process. He says postproduction work on the typical Hollywood movie is a vast assembly line of runners, technicians, assistants and others. With Murphy's Law in force at every step, it isn't always easy for filmmakers to get the results they want.

今年初上映的《十二宫》(Zodiac)的剪辑师安格斯•沃尔(Angus Wall)认为，数字化的真正影响在于使整个过程重新变得简单，艺术处理也更加灵活自如。他指出，一部常规好莱坞电影的后期制作是一个庞大的合成流程，涉及操作员、技师、助理等众多人员。由于每一个步骤都受到“墨菲法则”的约束，电影制作者要达到他们想要的结果并不容易。

The 'Zodiac' crew, by contrast, sought to rethink and streamline¹⁹ the process. Right on the set, the digitized film went into a computer; after that, just a handful of people were involved. While the skills were different, coordinating²⁰ the work of these editors and others wasn't much more difficult than what happens in an average office with a typical PowerPoint presentation. 'It's revolutionary and empowering, because you don't have to worry anymore about some nameless person somewhere not doing their job right,' Mr. Wall says. 'You start to see the joy come back into the movie-making process.'

十二宫》剧组试图重新思考和简化流程，一开始就把数字化影片导入电脑，往后只需要少数几个人参与就行了。如果跟办公室里常见的PPT演示做个比较，虽然技术不相同，从剪辑等工作人员的协调上看，电影剪辑并不比PPT演示要复杂多少。“这种方法真是非常强大，史无前例，你再也不用担心有人在某个环节没有做好他的工作，”沃尔说。“现在你会发现影片制作的乐趣又回来了。”