LAWRENCE, Kansas – I’ve never really loved editing. Something about it always seemed anticlimactic to me, which is largely why I prefer live television over film. There is just something about the adrenaline rush of doing anything live in the moment that you can’t match in an edit room. But it’s a necessary evil and one that is becoming more and more a part of live broadcasting.

For the last six years I’ve been living in college towns: four years in Lawrence and two years in Syracuse. The University of Kansas offers the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications; Syracuse University boasts the prominent S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Whether students in those schools intend to be reporters, producers, directors, writers, announcers, anchors or something entirely different, nearly all of them will take at least one or two classes that require them to edit video.

(Both universities also have separate film departments, KU’s in its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and SU’s in its College of Visual and Performing Arts. In most cases, students do more work with video than actual film, and editing is often required.)

With linear editing almost entirely a thing of the past, practically any kid with a laptop can try his or her hand at cutting together shots. For the ease of working in a non-linear environment, it has also become that much easier to edit something poorly. The new generation of aspiring journalists and filmmakers are increasingly imprecise with their edits, and being a perfectionist when I edit – another reason I don’t enjoy it more, there is no greater sin that to cut footage together haphazardly.

We are in the Age of the Amateur, where everything has been simplified to the lowest common denominator and do-it-yourself is a way of life. It once required incredible attention to detail and immense patience to edit – it still does for those who are good. Gone are the days of worrying about blacking tapes, control tracks or generations. The perception that digital somehow wiped out all flaws in video, which only a newbie would actually believe, leaves many people clueless when real problems arise.

People have bought into the idea that everything is now on auto-pilot, leaving too many students without any understanding of fairly fundamental digital concepts like time code. Don’t even bother asking why anyone would ever put bars and tone on a tape. Editing for classes has simply turned into a checklist of settings and protocols, most of which are rarely explained.

So, here is what I propose. Because of the variable resources at high schools in the United States, colleges and universities should dust off their analog tape decks and start teaching the pre-digital fundamentals. All introductory editing classes should be taught in a linear environment. I firmly believe that anyone who can learn to edit tape-to-tape is far more equipped to handle any editing software they’ll encounter. It is absurd to think that the “old” technologies have no place in a digital universe. Students need to appreciate what came first if they are ever to grasp what is here now.

Filed under: College, Opinion/Editorial