Edit Droid - Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages and Disadvantages

The advantages of using a digital editing solution over the older analog solutions (like the Moviola), were many. Not only is it much faster to locate the clips needed, keeping track of what can in some cases amount to a staggering amount of footage, is also much easier digitally. Also, editing film digitally is a non-destructive process, where the analog process requires the actual cutting and taping together of pieces of film as well as manual syncing of sound.

That said, in his book In the Blink of an Eye, editor Walter Murch mourns the loss of the older analog solutions where you had to move back and forth in the available material a lot to gain an overview, thus getting you very well acquainted with it. Since undoing an edit is such a laborious process there is a high incentive to get the best edit cut the first time. This process which is not necessary to the same extent with NLE solutions in which one edit point can be made and undone very quickly.

Furthermore, the resolution possible on a laserdisc is less than that of a 35mm celluloid (roughly 528 pixels wide on laserdisc vs roughly 5600 pixels on 35mm).

While the Laserdisc format was brought to market in the late 1970s (as DiscoVision and later, LaserVision) and despite persistent promises from the Music Corporation of America, a cheap method of recording laserdiscs never surfaced, making it exceedingly hard and cumbersome to create the needed laserdiscs for the EditDroid (at this time the storage available on a hard disk was very small and extremely expensive).

Furthermore, many potential customers of the EditDroid were put off by the fact that while Lucasfilm Ltd. were the creators of the EditDroid, George Lucas had never in fact used the EditDroid on a movie (despite the EditDroid having been shown with Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi clips on numerous occasions at tradeshows and at demonstrations). Lucas eventually used his EditDroids in the early '90s on his series "Young Indiana Jones Chronicles."