April 30, 2008
Walter Murch on Databases and Editing Movies
This interview with Walter Murch is essentially a commercial for FileMaker Pro, but the man did edit Apocalypse Now and his insight into how he uses FileMaker Pro as a database for managing the megawatts of information associated with editing a film is very interesting.
B.C. (Before Computing) index cards were used to capture details of each scene and each shot. Each card was manually numbered, entered into a logbook and the entry was correlated with film stored in large cans. He remembers thinking back in the 70′s, “Someday we’ll be able to have a computer in the editing room, and we won’t have to do this all by hand…it was kind of lusting after something that didn’t exist.”
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