I just decided to sit down and try to watch one of my childhood favorite shows—Battlestar Galactica (1978). I noticed something about the editing that was very jarring.
The music and the dialogue and often the ambient sound were often edited in a very ham-handed way—I presume to meet time limitations—but I find it very jarring, when beats are cut out of music, or natural conversational pauses are cut out, or ambient sound cuts in and out.
I’m watching on Netflix, so I assume I’m watching the actual show as it was aired, and not some version chopped up for syndication.
Was this common back then? Is anyone else bothered by this kind of thing?
The amount of special effects on a show like BSG 1.0 was such that all sorts of editing flaws got into the final product. You had several different groups working on the same bit of film at the same time - music, editing, sound, SFX, etc. The pressures of turning out weekly product with all that can be daunting, especially since nobody had done it before.
I don’t know how different it was for the weekly episodes but Jane Seymour (Serina) says what she was told about the film and what was shot turned out to be a whole lot different from what the final edit was.
It’s also a whole lot harder to do such fine synchronization well when the process is to physically cut and splice strips of film, with no digital assistance.