Hacker News Books

Hey, nice. This was one my favorite books in film school! Also, 'In The Blink of An Eye' by Walter Murch.

"In the Blink of an Eye" by Walter Murch (sound and editing on Apocalypse Now, Godfather, the Conversation, and so many more). The book is about film editing but actually about how humans absorb information.

Also, this is a good place to mention that his book, In the Blink of an Eye is an essential book for anyone who is interested in film editing, and an enjoyable book for anyone who is interested in watching movies. Fascinating stuff. Brilliant guy.

Note: He's not my father-in-law. I've never met him, just a fan.

The best book on video editing, bar none, is Walter Murch's "In the Blink of an Eye" so, get that and read it like 20 times. Then get yourself a copy of FCP and use export for web.

To shoot good video, the choice of camera (at least, prosumer) is not as important as lighting technique, I recommend getting a film production textbook from eBay(they're all pretty good really) and a trip to home depot to buy materials for a green screen, and make yourself a cheap lighting kit. For compositing and effects software, I can't really recommend after effects, but that's what I've used before. (eagerly awaiting an open source JavaScript replacement :( #wildestdreams

That should leave you in good shape. as for actors, yeah, it's worth budgeting for. Some folks can do multiple voices. That's how you can tell the good ones. Plenty of talent in any city though, just go to a local theater show and ask around.

As a film editor, and admittedly a Walter Murch fanboy, I still partially agree with your argument. I think, however, Murch is getting at something deeper here that he needs to elaborate on. I'm an Ebert fan as well, but you're comparing a critic to an engineer.

Real quick, this Citizen Kane bit is misleading. Welles's use of rack focus was noteworthy, but it was his use of deep focus that was the true wonder. It is much more noteworthy and famous, and possibly what you are meaning to refer to. It was a feat of engineering and lighting at the time, and not at all a paradigm shift as much as notch on the linear progression of film engineering.

Murch really did write the book on film editing. In The Blink Of An Eye is a short and to-the-point text book on film editing, an offers a simple theory as to why it works, which can be figured by the title. The theory seemed too simple to me the way he explained it, but I've come to understand he essentially means that film cuts are not jolting because we are used to blinking. Whether he is correct or not, the nuance of this understanding would basically argue there is a threshold for which the jolt could be overridden by an evolved necessity for being able to blink (and possibly other similar less-than-linear occurances in optical living).

Murch goes on, in the book, to apply this theory and he argues that elements such as narrative, beauty, concept and other cognitive intrigue can widen the threshold. All in all, he makes the what is probably the best argument so far for how and why the engineering of filmmaking magic works.

His book is the seminal textbook on film editing and worshiped by filmmakers generation after generation for it's timeless truths, because these truths offer a simple way for filmmakers to make decisions in their craft. They don't encroach on any style or technical achievement. Despite the practical delivery, they are essentially theoretical psychology.

He also pioneered digital editing.

I don't believe Murch is immune to Clarke's first law, but he is no Ebert. Murch is no critic. He is an engineer, and while this post doesn't get into the specifics, his claims here are supported in his battle-tested texts.

There’s a particular conundrum that makes 3D difficult, and that’s the frame rate. Broadcast TV (which we perceive as smooth and life-like) is 60 half-resolution frames per second—standard film is 24fps, 2.5 times less temporal information. Walter Murch makes a pretty strong case in his book In the Blink of an Eye that your brain actively works to fill in the difference, effectively imagining the rest in the same way it does while listening to a storyteller. This is what makes 24fps such a compelling frame rate for fiction, and why 60fps feels “too real,” — at higher rates of motion there’s no longer a need for imagination, and the “man behind the curtain” is revealed.

Unfortunately, in 3D, the temporal limitations of 24fps become apparent, perhaps again because the visuals start to become real enough that your brain no longer works as hard to synthesize reality. But now if you increase the frame rate, you end up with the first problem again, and maybe even worse—when watching The Hobbit in 48fps 3D, I was painfully aware of every camera movement, no longer feeling like a passive observer hovering in the air. It’s clear that if 3D really is the way things are from here on, many new techniques are needed, from the styles of acting and lighting designs to the way the camera moves and scenes are edited.

I’d guess one compromise would be splitting the difference, 3D projected at 36fps—something tells me that won’t come to pass though, and so maybe indeed 3D never will work…

This is not particularly surprising. When the transaction cost to read an article is lower, there's less "need" to use the work you've uncovered. By analogy, Walter Murch says in his book, "In the Blink of an Eye" that film editors need to avoid "seeing around the edge of the frame" - when the editor knows the hard work that went into getting a particular shot to work, the 'sweat investment', it's harder to discard that shot because it feels like a waste -- even if that's not the best shot to use. Similarly, my investment into getting an article means I'm more likely to use it the harder it was to obtain. By decreasing that cost, writers can be more 'objective' about what's actually useful.

Second, because I can easily get a different article, if the one I have doesn't say quite what I need, I can find something else.