I don’t much own or rent action movie DVDs, but I am interested in one feature–interactive editing functions that give you assorted coverage and/or alternate angles of sequences (presumbaly action-related) that you can recut and manipulate to give you an idea of what a film editor does.
Am I getting this right in assuming that these extras exist on especially generous DVD packages? And if so, can anyone recommend some particularly good examples of these features (completely independent of what you think of the movie itself)? Thanks.
Yes, on many DVD players, you see a feature called “angle”. It’s a second video channel. I’m not sure, but I don’t think you can choose between more than two, and only then when the DVD producer includes it. If the same scene was shot by two different cameras, the second camera shot may also be included.
I own more than a hundred DVDs , and NOT ONE of them utilizes this feature. I’ve only seen it used once, on a porn DVD.
There’s a great feature on the Die Hard Five Star Collection where you’re provided with a small selection of “coverage” on a few scenes and you’re able to edit them together and then view the result in comparison to the version actually used.
They’re accompanied by a commentary, IIRC, from the editor, explaining why he went with the final choice.
Very interesting stuff, and a glimpse of what I hope we’ll see on more of the bells-and-whistles DVDs in the future.
Oh I should add, ArchiveGuy, that I think they’re mostly simpler, dialogue-type scenes.
Thanks stolichnaya; I had first heard about this feature relating to the Die Hard DVDs (unseen by me) but didn’t know whether it had been used for other films as well. From the sounds of it, it may not be very common yet.
DVD has the capability of dividing a program – or segment thereof – into nine simultaneous video streams. The feature is most commonly used to provide multiple-camera perspectives of the same program (hence the ‘angle’ button on the DVD remote control) but may also be used for complex program branching (imagine a DVD based on the Clue board game where a touch of the angle button might show you the result of selecting Col. Mustard… In the Library… With a handgun.)
However, the DVD multi-angle feature does not give you the ability to re-cut scenes and assemble them into sequences of your own choosing. The DVD player has a small amount of memory that can be used for simple operations like tallying a score or remembering the location of a favorite scene, but there’s nothing in the player’s hardware or software that could support an “interactive editing” feature in any meaningful sense of that term.
True, some discs do have multiple versions of the same title on one disc (standard release vs. director’s cut, PG vs. R-rated editions of the movie, etc.), but the sector addressing commands that make seamless nonlinear disc playback possible cannot be isolated, removed or replaced from the program stream in situ.