How were movies and songs edited/mixed before computers?
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In regards to movies, its called cutting for a reason.
Because back in the day of 35mm film (as in the material) cameras, they literally just used scissors to cut out the bad parts. Before stuff was digitial, you literally assembled it by hand.
Physically cutting the tape/film with sharp knives and taping the ends together. After all thr cutting and taping they took the finished media and copied it to a new tape/film media.
Songs were simpler.
Listen to the Beatles – all they had was a 4 track recorder.
10 cc I’m not in love. The 500 voices were painstakingly assembled
Movies were shot on film. Film is a long ribbon of still images (typically 24 images per second of movie time.) To edit film, you can literally cut the reels and splice them together. That’s why people talk about deleted scenes ending up “on the cutting room floor.”
Songs have had a few different processes depending on what time period you’re talking about. In the 1940’s they’d just record the entire band at the same time, and would adjust levels by changing how far away people were from microphones. When multi-track recording was invented, studios developed the ability to record different instruments on different tracks, and they could then change the volume of each track to level the final song before they created a master. The Beatles would record dozens and dozens of tracks which would then get combined into four tracks for levelling, and finally into a single track for mastering.
For film, it was a matter of reproduction and literally cutting film to pieces and splicing it together. They’d start with film “masters”. This was the film that was in the camera on set or on location. This film would be developed and cut up based on scenes and takes. The editors and directors would work together to choose the takes they wanted for a given scene, and these scenes would be projected onto secondary rolls of film that would be cut and spliced together into the final sequence. This final sequence was then projected again onto distribution masters that would be sent out to theaters.
For music, the process is very much the same, but they used magnetic tapes to record the music. They would annotate takes based on the number of feet of tape that has run through the recording device. The tape would run through the machine at a rate of around 15 inches per second, so the reels of tape would be very large. Often, individual instruments would get their own microphone and tape. The audio engineers would mix and match the best takes and adjust the level of each instrument to form the best recording. They would literally play them back and re-record them onto the final master.
What’s interesting is that both of these processes introduce a small amount of loss at each stage of editing, because editing meant reproduction. Recording a playback is like recording a YouTube video playing on your computer using your phone. The quality suffers each time you do that. The studio equipment was optimized to minimize the loss of quality, but there’s only so much you can do.
When you hear that a film or song was “digitally remastered”, what happened is that the producers obtained the original masters, along with the original producer’s notes, digitized the originals, then re-edited the materials together to produce a new final master. Because we can reproduce digital film/audio without any loss at all, the remastered output often looks *much* better than the original.
My band recorded a CD in 1992. Before we started we had to buy 2 huge reels of recording tape. It was maybe an inch thick and maybe a foot diameter. Before we started playing, the engineer loaded one reel onto the recording device. The studio had a 32 channel sound board and the recording device had a recording head that could simultaneously record up to 32 different inputs on the recording tape.
Before we started recording we’d spent hours getting all the levels correct. Then when everything sounded pretty good, we’d record as a whole band. But the goal of the first pass was just to get the bass and drums right. Everyone else was playing just to make the bassist and drummer feel they were playing the whole song. So in the first pass, maybe 10 tracks got recorded. Before the engineer would hit record, he’d select the 10 tracks that end up on the recording tape (bass drum, snare, tom, tom, cymbal, high hat, bass guitar, …)
Then rest of the tracks (guitars, vocals, kbd, odd noises) were recorded 1 at a time. The engineer would rewind the tape reel to the beginning of the song, select which of the 32 tracks would end up on the tape (remember, tracks 1 to 10 are already recorded on the tape so don’t overwrite those) and he’d hit record and we’d hear the already recorded tracks and the ones that were being recorded would be written to that same tape reel.
After all the tracks are written to tape, the engineer and band would go over and over the recorded songs tweaking knobs to get levels and sound right for each track. When everything sounded good, he’d hit play and record again and the recorded music would play as we fade in and out parts that are supposed to end up on the master and ones that are not. And that would be recorded on the 2nd, unused reel.
1) The media on which they were recorded was physically cut and spliced together. This was most common with film, where the term cut is still used.
2) “Filters” were applied to the various input streams as they were were recorded. This could be as simple as placing a coloured sheet over a camera to alter the colour palette in the scene, or applying an electromagnetic filter to an audio signal to do anything from simply adjusting the volumes to more complex processes to introduce or remove noise. Things like the amplifiers and distortion pedals used with electric guitars are doing fundamentally the same things.
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