The digital revolution of cinema is well underway, but for some reason I'm still shocked that a movie as beautiful as Cold Mountain was edited in an off-the-shelf piece of software that runs on a personal computer. The movie was shot on film and scanned into a computer, and the negative was created from the digital scan.

At last year's San Francisco International Film Festival I attended a seminar on making movies yourself, on the cheap, and one of the panelists (whose name I can't remember), likened the digital video revolution to the desktop publishing revolution of almost two decades ago: for a while, you saw a lot of bad newsletters. I can use the same software that Walter Murch is using, but I, it goes without saying, am no Walter Murch.

In an interview on Apple's site, Murch says this:

I remember Al Pacino saying that what guided his performance of Michael in The Godfather was the idea of an imaginary spotlight always trying to find him, and that he was always trying to evade it. So I believe no matter what the discipline — acting, editing, or whatever — these ?meta-strategies? will give your work an extra depth and resonance, if you are lucky enough to find them. And if the material itself is rich enough to support them in the first place.

The audience doesn?t have to be consciously aware of them — in fact it is better if they aren?t. This seems paradoxical: why expend the effort for something that is not going to be directly perceived? It?s probably something like the effect of harmonic overtones in music. If a violin plays the note "A," we are consciously aware of the note itself, but there is a whole array of harmonics that comes along with the note, and these overtones are what gives each violin its particular tone. They allow us to distinguish an oboe from a violin, and in fact even to distinguish a Stradivarius from a fiddle.

The Godfather script gave Pacino the lines of dialog, but it was his ?meta-strategy? — those harmonic overtones — that told him exactly how to say them, and with what body-language.

One strategy I worked with on Cold Mountain was the idea that Inman was actually killed in the battle, and that it was his ghost — a ghost who doesn?t know he?s dead — who goes through all these adventures trying to get back home. It?s contradictory, of course, because the Inman we see is a solid physical being who interacts with everyone he meets. But the overtones of that idea are always hovering around the edges of each scene, informing in subtle ways where the cut points are, what reaction shots we used, and so on.

He sees the use of editing software as pragmatic: he had more concurrent editing stations than usual, used a laptop to show rough cuts to the director on location, and burned DVDs for the producer who was thousands of miles away. Comparing the software systems to "linear" physical ones, he finds only a couple of shortcomings, but I think they're evident in TV and, increasingly, movies:

I think there are only two areas where something is missing. When you actually had to make the cut physically on film, you naturally tended to think more about what you were about to do. Which — in the right proportion — is a good thing to do. The cut is a kind of sacramental moment. When I was in grade school they made us write our essays in ink for the same reason. Pencil was too easy to erase.

The other "missing" advantage to linear editing was the natural integration of repeatedly scanning through rolls of film to get to a shot you wanted. Inevitably, before you ever got there, you found something that was better than what you had in mind. With random access, you immediately get what you want. Which may not be what you need.

The pace of editing in most movies these days drives me nuts. We get a sacramental moment every three seconds.

There's more good stuff in the brief interview. It's fitting that the guy who did the audio montage for Coppola's The Conversation should so often refer to editing, and film in general, in musical terms.