11 Recording

Part 2 – Editing

Why edit?

There are two general reasons for wanting to edit a recording:

1.   To shorten or rearrange the order of items on the tape.

2.   To ‘clean up’ a recording by removing things likes coughs and other accidental noises. Under this heading can come mistakes such as mispronunciations by a speaker who has immediately corrected them, excessive ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ and general ‘fluffs’. With ‘quarter-inch’ tape, the mechanics of editing are fairly easy. A skilled editor can remove the smallest imperfection, helped by the fact that such tape may be moving at 38 cm/s, so that an unwanted sound lasting only one fiftieth of a second will occupy several millimetres of tape.

In the case of cassettes it can be said outright that any kind of editing is far from easy! In fact, it should be discouraged if only because a break at an edit point could cause a lot of mangled tape to get caught up in the mechanism.

I know of a Talking Newspaper for the Blind studio which gets round the problem by transferring cassette material to ‘quarter-inch’ and then editing that. The edited version is finally put back on to cassettes for distribution.

If such facilities do not exist then what advice is there? Let us take first the rearrangement of items. With a second cassette machine this should not be too difficult. Items from the first (‘master’) tape are copied on to a tape in the second machine in the required order. The process may be a little tedious but should be effective. There is, though, the risk of detectable degradation of quality in the copying.

What we may call ‘fine’ editing – the cleaning-up of short duration mistakes – is virtually impossible unless copying to a large format tape can be done. In other words, the options that are open to the recordist are either to do a retake or live with the mistake. The danger with retakes is that the performer(s) tend to be more nervous and this increases the risks of further and possibly worse mistakes! The question has to asked whether the ‘fluff’ is important and it may be worth making one or two general observations about such ‘mistakes’.

1.   It may be desirable to keep in some ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ if they are a characteristic of the person being recorded and provided that they don't become a distraction. For example, and this is purely hypothetical, the Chairman of the Governors of a school is speaking at the official opening of some new school buildings. He is well known for making slight, possibly nervous, coughs at fairly frequent intervals. It might be better (besides being easier!) not to try to edit all the coughs out, as this gentleman would sound unnatural without these characteristic noises. Of course, the editor has to make a probably not-too-easy judgement – how many coughs can be left in before they become distracting? Also, is there a risk of making the whole thing unnatural because there may be slight inflections in the voice which occur after a cough and would be out of place if there were no cough. Trial, error and experience have an important part to play!

2.   When considering whether to edit out anything, the background noise has to be considered. If this fluctuates in any way then there is a risk of a sudden and unnatural change in the background where there is an edit point.

3.   Although one should always expect – and possibly hope for – listeners to be critical, there is no point in worrying about little noises that will probably not be heard. It is an almost universal truth that if the subject matter is interesting so that listeners (and this includes listeners to the sound accompanying television pictures) are engrossed in it, then minor flaws can go unnoticed. This, of course, is no excuse for sloppy work!

Practicalities

There are two aspects to editing:

1.   First there is the mechanics of the job – the process of removing an unwanted sound, moving one section to somewhere else, and generally improving (hopefully!) a recording.

2.   Choosing the exact point, for example, to remove an unwanted sound; how much of what to move where. This is perhaps what we'd call the ‘artistic’ side of editing. This is the more difficult part. Some would say it's by far the more difficult part.

So we will try to deal with both, but it's not easy to show how to deal with artistically satisfactory editing in a book!

Editing tape

Full-size tape has the advantage that it is quite easy to cut and join sections. An ‘editing block’, which is a rather precisely machined metal bar with a slot cut in it lengthwise, is required. The slot is shaped so that it has a slight gripping effect on the tape, to hold it in place. Slots are cut in the block, usually at 45°, 60° and 90°, to act as guides for a single-sided razor blade. Precision cutting of the tape is thus possible.

Then to join two pieces of tape they are put into the block, butted up to each other and joined with a short piece of special tape.

Cassette tape is almost impossible to edit by cutting. Instead ‘dub editing’ is the easiest option. This means copying on to another machine and assembling wanted sections of the recording in whatever order one wants. Unfortunately copying of cassettes results in a degradation of quality and very fine editing is extremely difficult to do.

Digital tape editing

The trouble with digital recordings is that editing is a complicated business. It is quite impossible to cut the tape, as is easily done with conventional tape. The only method of performing edits is to transfer the digital signals on to a computer hard disk and then suitable software allows the operator to remove and reposition sections of the recording. A bonus is that the editing is ‘non-destructive’, meaning that the original is not altered.

Up to a few years ago, such digital editing systems were very expensive. However, with the hard disk capacities and processing speeds available on ordinary PCs, digital editing packages are now quite affordable. At least one of the books listed in ‘Further reading’ can provide much more information on this subject.

MiniDisc editing

A moderate amount of editing is very easily done with a decent machine. Sections of a recording can be marked off as separate tracks. Suppose a part of the recording is to be removed. The start and end of that part can be ‘marked’ so that the unwanted section appears as a complete track, which can be erased. A degree of moving ‘tracks’ can also be done.

It is doubtful whether it's possible with MiniDisc to do the very fine editing that's possible with full-size tape, where, as we've said, a good editor can take out fractions of a second of a recording by cutting. Similar accuracy is achievable with computer editing. Nevertheless, it's not difficult to edit to within half a second with a MiniDisc player's own system.