The Journey to Non-Linear Editing (Part 2) 

As a mathematician (one focused on computer graphics) i'm really thankful for this video, it is not only informative but it does justice to the science behind the field, which most people dont' know. Thanks.

My professor would play these videos in class to fill time. His theory is "Why retell everything he is going to say, when i can show you someone that has already said it". They were really helpful. 3 years after graduation and i'm still watching these videos.

I absolutely love this series of videos on film history. They are clearly written and beautifully presented. You are a master at connecting all the dots of film/video history and processes together. Each episode leaves me wanting more! As a video editor and engineer, I do have one small critical comment: Sony's Digital BetaCam actually WAS a component format internally. However, it was D-2 that was the first digital COMPOSITE system of recording, where the video actually recorded digitally on tape was the composite video signal. Digital BetaCam came out at a time when component video was not as common as it is today, so Sony included analog composite inputs and outputs to allow it to be used in composite systems immediately. But the machines did have Y/R-Y/B-Y inputs and outputs as well and recorded the video as digital components. Digital BetaCam also had BOTH analog and digital inputs and outputs, making it the first machine to bridge the gap between both analog and digital as well as between composite and component video. And unlike the D-1 format, Digital Beta recordings were mildly compressed. Other than this error, this series is amazingly informative and entertaining. I look forward to viewing each one, excited at what's in store. Keep up this great work.

This guy makes You feel like, the smartest boy in class explains you the thing that the teacher could never transfer to you properly. Bravo Love it!!!

Beautifully produced, well presented, accurate and concisely constructed narration of a highly technical field in easily digestible layman's terms. Much appreciated John. I will use your video for educational purposes when discussing the history of motion picture production and technology to undergraduate tertiary students, complete with citation (plug) to you and your work. Thank you for this powerfully coherent contribution to the body of freely accessible material covering this exciting and increasingly ubiquitous field. After all, nowadays a 12-year-old 'kid' can produce broadcast quality media on a home PC straight out-of-the-box, that would have either costed millions, or be practically impossible only a couple of decades ago. This historical account of motion picture technology represents the passage from an age of pioneering film production and delivery, to the era of ceaslessly emerging media technology that continues to in some way, shape millions of lives. Thank you so much for the time and energy put into this presentation. You are a gentleman and a scholar. Now, awaiting the definitive update sir... UHD, 3D and beyond. *wink* Cue: Applause (Roll Credits)

I work at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY. While significantly less than 20 years ago, a number of big-budget films are still using Kodak 35mm Color Negative film for capture.

Thank you. In 40 minutes I alleviated much of my ignorance.

Back in 93, I was working on FX for Last Action Hero. Kodak had a place which scanned film at 4K, take away the sound track and we got frames at about 3600. We did digital compositing and put back on film with a Celco recorder. We were getting into the last minute crunch, the supervisor Stuart Robertson had worked at ILM. He said ILM had played with 2K digital images, but applied a slight sharpening filter to make up for the lower resolution. We did that and it got us through the crunch. I have no idea what they did for Attack of the Clones.

I came here to watch a video about non linear editing. Got a master class about video compression from my college syllabus. That's an entire unit! Thanks dude

As a total amateur who just briefly touched the topic of filmmaking and is just before buying his own filmmaker equipment - I have to thank you for those videos. I watch them constantly, learning, discovering new stuff. You even made me improve in my primary "work/hobby" - photography. You have a great way of giving your vast knowledge to others and inspire them - now I can't wait to lay my hands on my own camera and making something. Thank you so, so much!

Excellent video! I still remember the greatness of the Video Toaster/Flyer. Edited so much stuff on that thing. Great times. :-)

How you are not more famous than you are is for me a mystery. Love the high quality and production value. It´s inspiring and very informative. Good job, and keep up the good work.

Not only is your presentation impeccable, it's also technically correct. Great job, I'm really enjoying your videos.

I said the same on the first part of this, it's so nice and refreshing to see you speaking so passionately about this topic, it's really lovely

This channel is so good! Super interesting!

NLE editing is really fascinating. What looks simple and intuitive in modern NLE editors is the result of a long technical evolution. But more importantly, it is the creative use of these tools that make for a great movie. Now everyone can cut some raw footage and assemble a movie somehow, but knowing what and how to cut... now that is where art and experience shine. As a beginner, it is humbling to have so many great tools at our disposal (most of them even free nowadays), yet being totally unaware of their true potential. It feels like being a kid with the power of a world maker machine at his fingertips. We are all potential Slartibartfast, but we don't yet have the talent to model the coastline of Norway. But at least, now we can make worlds.

I'm a media student and I must say, I am eternally grateful for these videos. They are very intuitive and enlightening. They have aided my research and essays tremendously and for that I am thankful. Keep up the fantastic job, I look forward to much more of your content!

I'm a seasoned editor and I learned the meaning of a few acronyms in this video. Thank you.

Hi John, so much work you’ve put into this. In 1972 I was watching guys editing 2” tape and all my working life, and still today, I have been part of this journey. I worked on Avid 1 which captured in AVR 90, and followed the whole development of file/data reduction. It’s not something I get to talk about much because when I do other editors get lost, but the way you tell it could benefit many video editors who haven’t a clue about colour space. The mathematics of this is a work of art, shame we can’t picture the algorithms. Thanks for making this. Keith

Man, if I could like this video (and the whole series so far, really) twice, I would. Thanks for these.

Excellent explanation of something I use at work every day and take for granted as an editor. Thanks

Very well done, sir! When you mentioned Randy Ubillos, iMovie immediately popped in my head. At my job we use Premiere CC but at home I use FCP X (I don't want to pay a subscription fee every month). I watched a show a long time ago that explained how they did the voice effect for Java the Hut in Star Wars. What took an entire room and thousands of pounds of equipment can now be done in the palm of your hand. Thank you very much for doing this. I know those graphics took a while to make!

Amazing videos!! The information you impart saves hours of arbitrary research! Thanks a lot!

I really enjoyed that history lesson...very informative...and helps make sense of the systems we se now. Your also a very good presenter as you can almost feel how much yo love the subject.. Thanks.

Have another way to prestige your better than rise from my chair and applaud you right now?! We have here a masterpiece for every aspirant of film making on entire YT.

When I first started at my current TV station in 1980, the older engineers there showed me the microscope-and-razor editing equipment that they still had on hand. That method had been phased out years before in favor of machine to machine editing (on AMPEX 2" Quads). 3/4" UMAT was the new kid on the block. Seeing how you had view the iron filings and slice between them gave me enormous respect for those guys. Of note tho, even back then, the herculean editing on "Laugh-In" was legendary.

I worked control room in local TV when I was a teenager and literally never knew what the 'toaster' was........my main memory of it is the station owner shouting "TOASTER'S OUT! HARD PATCH IT! HARD PATCH IT!!!" These videos are awesomely informative.

Lots of fun to watch! I recognized Computer Chronicles, shot at Collage of San Mateo where I studied broadcasting.

man i love your videos. its not only very informative, but also motivating. the way you're presenting the story moved and motivated me to keep learning about film making. thank you so much

I just spend a week in a hospital Netflix and Amazon were blocked in the WiFi so I looked 20 of your Videos and now I feel a lot less stupid then before. This is great and thank you for this great Videos explaining almost everything. Even if I understand and use a lot, in each and every Video are things I didn't know.

This is a very good video-I got here as a related link from looking up BBC training films on the VT department. All the thanks for your work. I'm not a mathematician (and have more experience with audio editing than video), but I think I can try and explain the DCT for those interested... The DCT is a specific implementation of something called a Fourier transform. The Fourier transform takes a signal represented as points in time (like the luma or chroma signals in a video recording, or the level of an audio signal), and transforms it into a signal represented as levels of sine and cosine waves at different frequencies. If you add up enough of these waves together, you can reproduce any signal you care to be interested in. (The D stands for Discrete, describing the fact that the signal is represented by sampled points (the digital world) rather than a continuous signal (the analog world).) However, the classic Fourier transform uses both sine and cosine waves to do this transformation-this allows for shifts of the waves in one direction or another in time or space, called phase. This can be important information, but it's usually OK to discard either the sine part or the cosine part of the transform to reduce the size of the information and not heavily compromise quality. And so the DCT, as its name implies, uses only the cosine part of the signal. The specific reason for this involves complicated math concepts I couldn't really explain properly, but in general, using cosines to represent a signal better matches many real-world signals (especially images), and usually leads to less noise/aliasing caused by using just sine waves. The end result: compact encoding of a video signal that doesn't lose a lot of quality in the process. Hope that's a sensible explanation.

What a marvelous series of videos, explained in layman terms and very well presented. Great stuff indeed!

My professor couldn't run normal college lectures today so they're having us watch this to make up for it. Pretty cool video. I'll have to keep this in mind once I start considering which video editor I should get a subscription for.

what an awesome work John your videos need waaaaay more attention cause you're doing a fantastic job in explaining, editing and animate them great presentation

16:10 The colour grading special effects in "Pleasantville" and "O' Brother Where Art Thou" was done using a system called a 'MegaDef' which was designed by Pandora International.

Very informative! Finaly got the understanding of 444 422 sampling. Thanks a lot and greetings from Russia!

I showed both part one and two of this series to my high schools students. They were excellent!

Was assigned to watch this video for an assignment, initially was going to skip through it, and ended up watching the whole thing! Lol Great content, and very informative.

This is the most informative video I have ever seen Thank you filmmaker IQ!

The best video that talks about the history of editing! And I love the last part, so inspiring!

i appreciate your uploads. although filmmaking is not easy you inform us very well and give us a lot of hope

Thank you, John. Fascinating journey of non-linear editing. :)

Chills from this video. Great work!

Informative, entertaining, and inspiring. Excellent series.

@Becky Morris-Ashton. This lesson isn't really about non-linear or linear - it's mostly about digital and how it came to use in video and filmmaking. Though most digital stuff really became more on the non-linear side.

John, you need to resume your film history videos. I know you have some interspersed among your new stuff, but this is the stuff I love.

John P. Hess, you are brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

Thank you Patrick. Love doesn't begin to explain it - it's a form of history making. Check out the course in the links in the about section - we've spent countless hours putting these courses together.

I'm fascinated and inspired! Thank you very much!

Fantastic job in explaining all this. Really love how much passion you put in these videos!

Very interesting subject and very well summarized. Thanks for making this!

I genuinely love listening to John.

Thak you John, beautiful series, please keep them coming!

Absolutely beautiful! Love it. Thanks.

Thanks for that information on Super Mario Bros, I didn't know its effects were the first to use the 2K resolution standard ! ;)

Thank you!

congrats you are doing a great work on depicting the beauty of the technical perspective of video creation history !!! best channel find of the year so far ;-) keep it up! thank you very much!

Thank you very much for this well researched documentary! It helped me a lot to prepare a presentation on the history of early video editing!

Musician/record producer Todd Rundgren built a music video studio around the Video Toaster and Lightwave3D. He made several videos NewTek's used on their demo tape. A year or two later music videos converted to film and Todd quit the video business. In '93 Babylon 5 used Toasters and Lightwave3D to create groundbreaking CGI effects for TV.

Really, really great educational videos - lot of useful information and facts, all interestingly presented! Thank you very much.

Bravo! Great work Mr. Hess !

Great story from ideal storyteller! Keep it up!!

Thank You for all your informative videos.

Thanks a lot for those lovely lectures, I really appreciate you and your skills!! Thanks a lot again and again!

Back in 1993, I was interning at a startup production company that was getting what the dealer said was one of the first online-quality nonlinear edit systems, the ImMix Video Cube, and we were among the first in the country to get it at the time. Anyone remember that one? All the storage modules were these cool-looking blue-and-beige cubes, pretty bulky in those days. And to think now I'm at home editing for my employer with a lot more compact hardware that I was able to pay for on my own dime (save for the Adobe subscription which I log into using the employer's credentials).

your all videos great. thanks Mr Hess.

Brilliant! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Brilliant presentation.

That was EXCELLENT. Thanks so much

From a former colleague (who was there when MPEG-2 was being developed) has a correction for you relating to the reasons and timing of its development: "Development started in 1992, by General Instrument, for cable but its first wide scale deployment was in the mid-nineties for DirecTV…."

Love all your videos.

Fourier Series expansion in films!! Amazing

I have a full set of Video Toaster floppies right next to my desk right now. Nice to know the SMB movie did one thing right!

Damn, that last speech was really inspiring. It's like the "Patton" speech of film-making. It really makes me want to go see what stories others want to tell. So I'm off to see The Emoji Movie! :D Really good video. I just discovered these, and I am devouring them. :)

Love your videos, John! Thank you!

Nice final message!

this needs more views

FYI - The media for most DI's would acquired with a film data scan, not telecine. And DI output to film is done with a film recorder, not an optical printer.

So much good info. Thank you for this, just... thank you!

Thank you. That was great !

.......and WE lived through this!!!!!!!! We lived through this era of change.

wonderful class!

An excellent overview, presented in such an engaging way. Just one small note though... Digi Beta recorded a digital component signal (YUV) to tape, NOT a digital composite signal...

Awesome series and channel. Well presented.

Wonderful. Thank you.

8:21 - In simple words, DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) breaks each block into a bunch of differently sized horizontal and vertical sine stripes plus grid-ajusted “hills” (or “goosebumps”).

It's really hard to remember everything of everything . Good informations !

I love these videos. I'm so into the filmmaking, trying to make my own movies. But I still get to one point, when my brain stops. So I would have a prayer. Could you please make a video about how professional filmmakers compress the files? I believe the amount of footage they must have and the quality they work with, has to be massive in terms of file size. How do they compress these files with keeping beautiful quality and a really small file size? What codecs they use? Make a video, please :)

Brilliant video

I saw an optical elusion that illustrates why we do not need a hi amount of color information. I was looking at an image that had a serpentine narrow balk line down the middle of the image. The left side of the line was white the right side was yellow. Luminas was the same on each side of the black line. . . . . The black line was on a clear acetate sheet. When you lift the sheet you could see the divide between the white and yellow was strait and not serpentine. Put the clear sheet down and it would appear to be serpentine again. Great elusion.

Best series about Video and film on the entire world wide web. Should be equivalent to a college course in broadcast and film production. The history, the technology, the art, is all discussed and seamlessly woven into an interesting and easy to understand sessions. I love them all. Having said that, at 3:44 he states that DigiBeta is a composite video format but it isn't. DigiBeta is most certainly a component system, 4:2:2 to be exact. And the DigiBeta cassette is based not so much on the BetaSP cassette as it is on the original betamax cassette. BetaSP was also based on the betamax cassette. I will forgive them this one error, and admit that DigiBeta was used in facilities that had only composite routing, patching, and switching because the DigBeta model A500 deck had a composite video option. The DigiBeta decks also all had both analog and serial digital inputs and outputs. I recently tossed 4 of them into an electronics recycling dumpster. A sad day. (but I kept 2)

Amezing incedible story.

The DCT does not compress the information. You get the same amount out as you put in. This information is then rearranged to produce a serial stream with a lot of long stretches of zeros and ones. Huffman coding then compressed this stream. Even learning that much made my brain hurt! The math behind it all is amazing.

I'm so glad that I'm at the beginning of an age where filmmaking is democratized.

Wow u explained it very well !!

You lost me at; Welcome. lol Seriously very interesting.

soooo good !!! thank you!!!

Superb!

You are awesome!

Who are you? Simply Superb!!