Unless I got turned around, you were responding to jjakucyk who was responding to Ascenray who was discussing soap operas, not film.
Also, Musicat, you’d be surprised how much NLE was used in films in an indirect way early on. I watched Robert Rodriquez cutting Desperado in ca 1994 on a Lightworks system. Basically the raw footage would get telecine’d to SD video and edited, then an EDL would be produced and the film cut for the final production. Which sounds like a nightmare to me, but they made it happen. Audio was done on several Pro Tools systems then wedded to the cut film.
I was responding to post #37, primarily. My film experience is pre-1990 (digital video, post-2010), and mostly in audio, not film, so don’t consider me to be an expert even tho I was formerly involved in the Hollywood industry.
Squeegee, that’s very interesting. I wonder why they used computers for editing if it was so hard and slow, and required rendering back to film for projection.
“American Graffiti” was shot in Widescreen 16mm (instead of using widescreen format, they used film shot in a half-height format to get low-resolution widescreen).
The low-resolution projection is part of what give the film a “documentary” feel. (That, and the director selecting shots where the actors made mistakes).
Because it was incredibly cheap to do. They used a 3rd party to telecine the film (a competitive industry at that time and this was LA) then a PA would digitize it all onto hard drives. The director/editor (Rodriguez) would edit the whole thing himself in a set of scenes that would get cut (good old fashioned razor-blade style) on the original film using EDLs converted to feet+frame code. And it wasn’t slow - the lightworks system was quite sprightly (because SD) and had a dedicated edit controller peripheral; Rodriguez was incredibly good with this system, and he could cut scenes very quickly (he was seriously quick with the Lightworks control system; I saw). There was no render back to film: the film itself was cut using the edit decisions from the SD transfer. Basically offline editing. All of the post work was done in Rodriguez’ house in LA: ProTools in the living room, edit in one of the bedrooms, all the footage hung up in the garage.
Rodriguez made a name for himself making his own film, El Mariachi, using $7000 of his own money. It was well received and he basically became an sold himself as an advocate of better/cheaper/faster film making. Desperado was the project immediately following El Mariachi, and I guess hewed to that philosophy.
I just checked out Gemini Man and wow. You’re right, it’s not a great movie, but it’s stunning how different 4K60 looks vs. 4k30. Thanks for mentioning it!