Looks freaking awesome!.

Looks great. I, for myself, have waved film goodbye for good last summer where I watched one last movie being ptojected in 35mm (I always look back through the window to check what machine is there).
It is happening now what has been happening some 12 years ago with music production: the final and definte transition from analog tape to digital software based workstations (DAW's).
You can do so much more, so much more radical and refined, and so much faster on digital - BUT that also changes expectations, the entire philosphy, approach, deadlines and budgets.
In another 12 years noone will even consider using film anymore. It will be way too expensive, slow and way too few people will now how to process it (just like stills photogtaphy). There is no "film vs. digital" situation - it is inevitable: digital already IS here to stay. If anything: this documentary is a final farewell to film.
I grew up with real film, owned several Super 8 and 16mm projectors, I was the guy who projected the 16mm movies on the Siemens 2000 or Bell and Howell TQI back in high school in the 70s, short bfore they were replaced by small tv sets and vhs tape in ridiculously poor quality (by now we have DVD-BluRay projection, which is way superior to 16mm film). I spend lots of time around real 35mm projectors and the guys who knew them inside out. I went with many a tv news reporter using Eclair coaxial and Arriflex 16mm (ST and BL models) film cameras, and later peeked into the rtooms with the 6-plate Steenbeck flatbed film edition system - and watched how it all got replaced by video formats.

You miss that magic when you actually went through this time and film meant film. Now it's just a word to describe high res digital video. There soon will be entire generations who won't miss it and only know it as the moving image equivalent of steam engines. I'm very old fashioned when it comes to technology, especially regarding art forms. I think the very heart is being ripped out - yet I was the first to fully embrace digital for music (both production and music notation) and "film", because it makes things possible, accessible and fast for the average joe, which were a privilege of a few "chosen ones" before. But as a guy who went through the old technologies, there is nothing to be excited about. Digital will be soulless - forever. But it's 100% inevitable. It will prevail everywhere. Not a shred of a doubt. farewell good old film, after roughly an entire century - with the last 15-20 years being a transitional phase with intermediate steps being digital anyway.

Time goes on...

My worry (well, one of my worries) is that the current poor state of movie editing will get even worse now that everything will be done on the Avid or something similar.

Sit a kid down on a reel-to-reel machine with a razorblade... or hell, even a tape deck to tape deck machine, and he will learn some very important stuff about editing. You are given one simple, all important option: to cut or not to cut. The more you experience editing in that condition, the more you will learn about the all-important art of assembling a movie.

Sit a kid down on an Avid, with no prior experience, and he's confronted with a million billion options. That's no way to develop the sense of discrimination that an editor absolutely needs. There is no limitation to what can be chopped, how thinly it can be chopped, where it can be moved, what effects can be applied, etc. When there is no limitation--no resistance to the artist by his tools--then there are few opportunities to reflect on whether or not the choices he's making are wise choices.

In a lot of modern movies, I see the result of an industry that has been spoiled by limitless options in the editing room. I see a profession being overtaken more and more by people who were given every tool in the tool box before they ever hammered a single nail.

You are taking the words right out of my mouth. Yet it's inevitable. I will even add one more: with the latest digital technology doing the work for you (preset color timing, Sonar elastic time stretch/compression/correction, formant correcting pith correction, content awareness in PhotoShop.....) There will be no more sense of true achievement. But then again: this is my mindset. Newer generation will have a hard time feeling a sense of achievement, when they do what anyone can do with the right app/software. Man I miss the times of Super 8mm when everything was destructive editing, each pass through the projector was harmful and the word "undo" was still decades into the future.

Lousy electronic fuel injection!!!

There was a time when a man could hold a 500 Holley IN HIS HANDS, and didn't have to mess with 'mapping' the injection system using a laptop through the CANbus. Sure the carburetors were finicky when cold, could flood the engine while attempting to start a partially warmed vehicle, and weren't the most efficient, but they're what I knew.

Any monkey with a PC can reprogram or re-chip the fuel delivery system on a modern vehicle, to OEM specs or to performance specs given the inputs or mods to exhaust, air intake, boost pressure, etc...

Times they are a-changing.

"And for achievement in editing, this year's Oscar goes to....the HAL 9000."

Yep, the issue IMHO is: knowledge, arts, craftsmanship and entire professions are being lost forever as we speak. You can find on Youtube some truly talented people (a lot of it is crap, but from time to time there are amateurs - not spoiled rich kids with everything at their disposal including personal coaches complete with the network - who are incredibly talented) - I think the "you are going places!" comments are all just wishful thinking. Modern technology (requiring less and less specific skills) makes it even easier for the guys who just talk the talk (but don't walk the walk) to make it. Back in the day people needed luck, the ability to sell themselves and deliver when they get the job. I guess you can drop the third part by now.....

Yes, there are still incredibly skilled people, but making money with these skills? I doubt it. The web is filled with very, very poor and hilarious Photoshop hackjobs - they even stare in yout face at the newspaper and magazine stand. Because neither the Photoshop "artist" know squat about their art nor do the cheap bullshit talkers who hire them. That's how it works now. The trouble started when people who know their trade looked average and weren't well spoken in some cases, it's the well dressed, pretty arrogant people wgho are full of shit who get the jobs. That's why we are where we are. I am not talking out of frustration, it's just a fact. Why are there "ten things never to say or do on job interviews" - articles? Because the interviewers hire the package, not what's in it.

This reminds me of an old MAD-magazine joke: (in the early 80s with all those "Part 2" movies) "And the Oscar for best screenplay this year goes to...... Mr. Rank Xerox!"

There will be a lot of scrap produced due to this condition. But, for a little while, there will be some seasoned professionals that embrace the additional tools and transform their vision even more effectively to the final product. There will also be a select few youngsters who will know intuitively how to manage the expanded toolbox and, along with learning from the masters, will take it to better places. At least that is the way it works with most things and my hope is that it will do the same for film.

Technology can't replace love and dedication. It won't produce something better than a Stradivarius, or Citizen Kane, or Bar at the Folies Bergères, but it gives those with vision more options. It is a little fun to think about what Mozart might have done with access to the technology and knowledge that modern day artists like Threeperf35 has. Would it have diluted his mastery, or would it have expanded the greatness and volume of his output?

Well it is a known fact hat one cannot second guess anything which happend in the past. Change one thing, and this will cause so many other things to change as well. But as a fun thought thse kind of things are always great. Well most modern technology in music are made for convenience. Things are faster, can be done with less people involved (now one orchestrator writes the entire score on computer and proof-listenes to it for errors then extracts the parts - want to change key? Want to insert/delete/shuffle bars? just edit). Up to the late 20th century the score was written in coarse, then in fine and definitive then given to people who extracted the instrument parts by hand (a good moonlightong job for musicians to make extra bucks). You can do a lot more now with modern equipment, but is it better? Yep, some of it, mostly regarding acoustic instruments. Mozart had gut strings, now we use steel strings, which are brighter and much less prone to get out of tune after 5 minutes into the concert. Electric light on stage which is better than 2000 candles ready to set the place on fire....
Mozart might have done some awesome stuff with the modern drumset, electric guitar, modern horn instruments with better piston design and "tubing", some of tghe great modern keyboardsd - especially the modern concert grand piano, which was not around when Mozart was alive. But computers? Yep, to help add a few things here and there - but all in all: I think his symphony Nr. 40 in G minor sounds pretty well with what he had....

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw

Quoted in? Correct: Little Man Tate

If it only were true that progress always means true improvement and advance....

I believe you're right 3perf. A quote quoted. Well played.

Trust me, watch the movie: I am correct. Thanks for the kind comment.