There was a debate on another forum about film vs digital resolution and how with digital, you’re stuck with the resolution you’ve captured and you’ve irretrievably lost detail. Film, on the other hand, you can pull out details by going back to the original stock.
My response was that, even if a movie were shot on film and distributed on film, as an intermediary, the film would be scanned into a computer at some fixed resolution, it would be color graded and had vfx work done at that resolution and it would be printed on distribution prints at that resolution. Unless we’re talking about films that are entirely manually edited, there’s always going to be a resolution limiting step in the middle.
So my questions is when did people stop editing films completely manually without the aid of a computer and, also I guess, when did people first start editing films digitally.
The first feature film cut on Avid was in 1992, a film called Let’s Kill All The Lawyers (and there’s really no other reason to remember the film). There were earlier computer-aided editing systems, like LucasFilms EditDroid and Montage, but those were still tape-based, so not really what you’re asking about.
It would be a few years before it became commonplace, and more common than cutting neg, but I couldn’t really give a date when the changeover happened. But mid to late 90s is a good timeframe as a reference. When I first moved to L.A. in 1993, one of my first jobs was as a post-production P.A., and my main job was loading a Moviola so the director could view dailies. It was a skill I would never get a chance to use again.
I’ll add - I made a feature film in 2001, and there was never a discussion about digital/non-digital editing. I think it’s safe to say that by that point, editing digitally was a given.