Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema

Chapter 1. The Last Preview

If people consider film editing at all, they think of the editor as being the person who takes material selected by the director, cuts out the bad bits, and then puts everything together into a coherent whole. Sometimes that’s exactly what happens, of course. But in a motion picture industry dominated by specialists and highly trained crafts-people, the editor needs to be as much a generalist as a specialist, as much an artist as a technician, as much a diplomat as a good soldier. He must take the initiative as often as he follows a producer’s or director’s lead. He needs to be as comfortable with complex databases ...