My friend Anke is so much cooler than the rest. She carries her 5'9" rockstar body very nonchalantly, knows everything about T.Rex, and on top of all, the girl knows how to edit real reel tape. I am talking spinning, splicing and taping back together. Like back in the early 1980s. Before some of us were born, and when reel-to-reel tape editing was not just a form of art but also the only way to edit sound.
These days computers allow us not just to edit audio but also audiovisual material digitally. These days nobody spins, splices and tapes. These days we drag and drop, shift things back and forth with our computer mouse. These days we never have to worry about killing a bite with one rash cut.
Programs like Final Cut Pro for video or Cutmaster Pro for audio -€“ the only audio program I have ever used extensively -€“ make editing a convenient job that causes us very few worries. After a 30-minute instruction we could already create decent video bites to enhance our formerly print-only story and put it on the Web. The special skill has become a basic skill in the Stauffer Multimedia Newsroom.
If you are not taking an online-journalism class at the University of Kansas and learning how to edit there, you only need to enter "video editing" into google. And .48 seconds later a Web site called "How stuff works" educates you on the essentials of digital video editing. Ta-ta, rocket science.
I have enjoyed using Final Cut Pro with its easy menu and drag-and-drop system. As opposed to iMovie or already outdated audio programs like Cutmaster Pro, Final Cut is easy to use and for now perfectly suitable for our tasks in the newsroom.
So far, not many newsrooms have followed the online model and demanded video editing skills from their employees. But I predict that it won't take too long until younger editors realize that in our converged newsosphere, digital editing skills can be as easily acquired and required as a decent sense of grammar.
Is that a good thing? Probably, but journalists have to make sure that all the easy editing won't push aside the fact that video still needs to be shot well. Otherwise, even a skilled editor will have trouble putting together a quality bite.
People like my friend Anke, however, will always stand out from the crowd. While the whole news world may soon be able to quickly piece together a digital video package, she will remain one of the chosen few who can splice and tape back together and, while doing it, look so much cooler than the digital rest of us.
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