how were movies and songs edited/mixed before computers?

Question

How were movies and songs edited/mixed before computers?

In: 2

Answer 1

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.