The Editing Room Handbook: How to Tame the Chaos of the Editing Room, 4th ed. by Norman Hollyn (review)

Over the past twenty-five years, film postproduction has seen major changes as editing shifted from the mechanical Steenbeck, KEM, and Moviola flatbeds to the digital timelines of computer-based software such as Avid, Final Cut, and the Adobe Creative Suite. Although the racks of white paper boxes of film have been replaced with hard drives and network storage, bins are still bins, and the skills needed to manage the postproduction process have remained the same. Now in its fourth edition, The Editing Room Handbook by Norman Hollyn has kept pace with those changes while remaining focused on strong organization, clear communication, and collaboration as the fundamentals of successful postproduction in film and television. Hollyn is an associate professor and head of the editing track at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and an editor who has worked on a wide range of film and television projects for such filmmakers as Alan J. Pakula, Sidney Lumet, and Francis Ford Coppola. Hollyn brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the task of explaining postproduction.

To guide the reader through the intricacies of "post," as it unfolds in an actual production, Hollyn informs us that we have just been hired as an assistant editor for a feature film titled Silent Night, Silent Cowboy. He then introduces us to the cast of characters with whom we will be working, including editor Wendy Libre and the apprentice editor Philip Spring. Through this fictional device of a feature film and its postproduction team, Hollyn guides the reader from the early days of setting up the editing room and ordering supplies to the final days of creating prints from a timed negative and providing the deliverable elements for television versions and DVD extras.

As Hollyn guides us through the stages of postproduction, we are taught the various duties and responsibilities of a good assistant editor. The assistant's job includes prepping all materials for the editor; hiring apprentices and film-runners; maintaining editing equipment and supplies; functioning as a liaison with the production office, lab, sound house, and other outside vendors; maintaining up-to-date logs and backups of all materials; cleaning up the editor's machine; creating DVD copies of rough cuts for producers and staff; outputting cuts for screenings; and taking notes during those screenings. In short, the assistant editor does everything to make sure the editor can continue to edit and move the postproduction toward completion. This means an assistant must master a wide variety of technical and procedural duties while managing to keep all phases of the post process organized and moving forward.

One of Hollyn's skills as a writer is his ability to break down the complexity of the post-production process and explain the smallest details. For example, his discussions of file and folder management and the proper use of subfolders within bins makes it clear that the successful editing of any project relies on the ability of the editor to quickly access properly labeled materials. Hollyn presents us with models of proper folder management for both scripted features and unscripted documentary films, explaining the relationship of the folder structures to the type of project. He also delves into the underlying structure of digital editing software and how it allows for the creation of multiple folders that all point back to the original footage. A knowledgeable assistant can place multiple "copies" of—or more accurately, pointers to—the footage under different categories for the editor's use. A single shot in a scripted film might be placed in two or three folders so that the editor can access the material within a dailies bin, a scene bin, or a cut bin. A single shot in a documentary project might be placed in bins based on dailies, logical categories of footage, or specific cuts. While explaining the logic of setting up file folders, Hollyn is laying...