Might be dumb question, but how are such complex movies like Oppenheimer or Interstellar edited?
Do they use a special program or do they edit with Premiere Pro / Davinci Resolve?
And does the movie get split up in different chunks so many editors can work on the movie at the same time?
If so how they do they make sure that everything fits with the music and sound effects timewise if it’s not edited as a whole?
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Most of the time full-length films are edited using Avid software. Although the software supports multiple editors at once, many times one editor will be working with the director to cut the scenes together. The dialogue (automatic dialog replacement) and sound (effects and music )goes on once there’s at least a pretty good edit completed.
The general term is NLE (Non-Linear Editor). As what others stated Avid is one. There are a few others. You’d normally load in dailies into your “clips” section and then the director or editor can start stringing them together along a timeline in the order they think they want the movie. Sometimes you’ll find that they have created story boards and they will scan in those frames and will do a first film cut with just story boards and replace scenes with real footage. And as they progress they can then do ADR (Automatic Dialog Replacement), audio affects, audio cleanup filters, and music layers.
The same can be done with video.. The old school “Wipes” or such are just two video strips laid on on top of each other and then a transition filter applied.
The best NLE are non-destructive so they can edit and re-edit until they get it just right.
The group that started this was actually Lucas Films. As they wanted a way to quickly edit together different cuts without actually cutting the film (which was expensive and degraded the film). Their system would do a low-res scan of the film. It would be tagged with the film can, and frames. So when they decided to do the real film cut they could just print off the film can numbers and frames and hand it to a splicer.
The NLE process improves things and allows the director and editor more control, but it still a grueling process.
To answer the last part of your question, usually the typical process is editing the raw scenes without score/music/sound effects/color grading. This is called picture lock, along with dialogue some mild sound/music will naturally be a part of that but it’s mainly about editing the footage together. Once picture locked the film is sound edited and sound designed, and color graded. This way everything can fit together because as the name implies, after picture lock nothing about the timing will be changed so all the other components of the film can start to be added on.
With many films ofc picture lock can be changed after the fact but generally that’s how the process goes to ensure sync of everything
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