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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

I hate editing mistakes more. The Aviator has quite a few of these where for example in cut A two characters talk by walking side by side, in cut B they stop and turn towards each other (still talking), and in cut C they continue the talking but you can see cut A and C are the continuation of each other and cut B was inserted in the middle https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4

And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4

Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...

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You might be interested to know that in terms of editing skill, physical matching/continuity is the least important thing to get right:

https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/walter-murch-rule-of-six/

Anybody can edit a scene so that there are no inconsistencies. The art of editing comes from maximizing emotional impact, then the story, then rhythm. When editors sacrifice matching for those, it's not a mistake -- it's intentional.

The fact is, editors work with the footage they're given -- reshoots happen when new scenes are needed or footage is unusable, but not for continuity errors. If the most emotionally impactful combination of shots has a continuity error, the worse for continuity.

I’ve managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all tense when there’s a multi-camera setup for a conversation, waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone’s hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not slightly!) different position.

Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot where shots don’t match up.

Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins Jackson’s LOTR trilogy for me, it’s in basically every damn scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor’s eye, so many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some in lots of movies but OMG it’s bad in those.

I have always considered it an actors job to ensure their hands or cigarette or whatever are in the same position when they hit the same word during multiple takes.

It's never going to be perfect or identical. Actors' #1 job is to give an emotionally believable, powerful performance. A thousand little details are different in every take, and your movements will change to reflect what is authentic in the moment. In fact, editors want emotional variety so that they have more options in assembling the scene.

Yes, things are blocked ahead of time. You'll stand up at the same moment, you'll stop walking at a particular mark. But there are limits, especially with things like hands and cigarettes. If you look for continuity errors around those, you'll find them everywhere. Actors, directors and editors have more important things to worry about.

The first time I noticed one of these errors I was pretty shocked to have spotted a clear error while casually watching a show. Now that I know to look for these types of inconsistencies though I see them all the freaking time. It's surprising how often an actor's positioning bounces back and forth between shot angles, to the point that now it distracts me from what I'm watching at times.

The Schoonmaker/Scorsese movies tend to have more continuity errors than usual because they tend to prefer using their favorite take even if it has continuity errors. Editing is ultimately about far more than simply stitching shots in an error-free manner, though I will agree that the Best Editing award sometimes seems to be handed out at random.

Thelma Schoonmaker is well known for favoring impact over the tradional ideal of seamless editing. You might not like her style, but it is deliberate choices rather than “editing mistakes”. This wasn’t even her first oscar, she got one for Raging Bull and won again for The Departed

Oh, I have a similar pet peeve but for watching live sports. Sometimes they’ll cut from the ‘main’ camera angle to a different one mid-action but it will be slightly out of sync and noticeable. For whatever reason this is super noticeable to me and bugs me to no end.

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