Get Your Finger Off That Dissolve Button!

I can barely watch television anymore.  Seriously.  It seems that no one knows how to edit anymore, and the culprit in this demise is the non-linear editor.  Allow me to explain.

About 20 years ago, I went to Los Angeles to visit a friend that had landed a producing job at KNBC.  During my tour of the station, my friend towed me through the edit suites.  Above the door was a huge banner that read:

IF YOU CAN’T SAY IT WITH A CUT, MAYBE YOU SHOULDN’T SAY IT AT ALL.

I thought it was funny then.  At that time - the late 1980’s - editing was strictly a linear, tape-to-tape affair, and footage was recorded to tape.  This wasn’t too big of a deal most of the time, because most edit suites were cuts-only, machine-to-machine rigs.  However, once in a while you’d run across a multi-machine A/B roll suite, with an edit computer controlling the whole shebang, including a video switcher.  This was Valhalla for a creative-minded editor, because now the whole wide world of dissolves, wipes, keys and maybe even DVE moves were available at your fingertips - except when you wanted to do an effect between two shots that were on the same tape.  That’s when the “dub reel” came into play.  (Later, some tape formats incorporated digital memory in the form of “pre-read,” but that’s another story.)  If you really HAD to have that dissolve, you would cue up the 2nd shot in the player deck, then dub it over to another tape - the “dub reel.”  The dub reel got placed in the second playback deck, the tapes were cued and prerolled, and the dissolve magically appeared (assuming there wasn’t a glitch, of which there were many.) 

As laborious as this sounds, believe me, it was actually worse than that.  So, many dissolves just didn’t happen - no one wanted to go through all that hassle over and over again.  And oddly enough, our editing and storytelling skills were sharpened by the need to think our way around changes in place and time that occurred within a story.  Because that is essentially where dissolves belong - at changes in place and time, and very few other places at all.

All that is gone today.  Every shot in an NLE can be butted up against any other, and any of a million transitions can be placed in between.  I see stories on both local and network TV that will dissolve between the wide shot and the closeup in the SAME INTERVIEW!  I see dissolves used as a kind of salve between two soundbites of the SAME PERSON, sitting in the same place, at the same focal length!  Don’t these photogs shoot any B-roll?  Do the managers think people won’t notice?  Well, I notice, and it screams in my head:

LAZY EDITOR.

But, hey.  It’s a USA Today world, right?  Good enough is good enough, right?  Sorry, but I dissent.  And I’ll fight for the day when dissolves are rare and motivated, when L-cuts and J-cuts come back into fashion, and editing rises again above the level of slamming footage together as fast as possible to get that dreck on the air.

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