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Editing On Films Is Now Being Done On Computers
Like any modern professional, Naomi Geraghty took her laptop with her when she went on a business trip in January. The machine got a lot of use -- but not just for email.
1月份出差时，娜奥米•杰拉蒂(Naomi Geraghty)带上了她的笔记本电脑──跟时下所有专业人员一样。她的电脑有很多用途，不仅仅是收发电子邮件。
Ms. Geraghty is a film editor and was spending 10 days at the Irish coastal home of Terry George, director of 'Reservation Road,' starring Joaquin Phoenix, which opened across the U.S. last week. Mr. George couldn't travel for the editing, so Ms. Geraghty loaded a copy of Avid editing software on her Apple PowerBook and went to him.
杰拉蒂是一名电影剪辑师，这次出差的目的地是《救赎之路》(Reservation Road)一片的导演特里•乔治(Terry George)在爱尔兰的海滨别墅，时间为10天。由于乔治没办法远行，杰拉蒂只好带着已经安装了Avid编辑软件的苹果PowerBook来找他。这部影片最近在全美上映，华金•费尼克斯(Joaquin Phoenix)在里面扮演角色。
Most people have a mental image of film editors hunched in the dark over editing consoles with lengths of film pinned to the wall behind them. These days, they sit at computers, moving scenes around as easily as paragraphs in a word processor.
提到电影剪辑师，大多数人对他们的印象是：猫在某个昏暗角落的操作台旁，长长的胶片钉在身后的墙上。如今的剪辑师却是坐在电脑桌前，他们在屏幕上移动画面就像用文字处理软件挪动段落那么轻松。
Video files are so demanding, editing computers used to cost tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of dollars. But as Ms. Geraghty's tale suggests, even relatively low-end personal computers, laptops included, are now so powerful that Hollywood pros have joined student filmmakers and indies in taking advantage of them.
由于视频文件对电脑配置的要求很高，用来剪辑的电脑过去动辄几万甚至几十万美元一台。而现在，即使相对低端的个人电脑，包括笔记本，都已经非常强大。于是，好莱坞的电影专业人士纷纷加入学生制片人和独立制片人的行列，用起个人电脑──杰拉蒂就是一个典型例子。
It's one more example -- along with music recording and graphic design -- of the way cheap computers are blurring the distinction between professional and amateur tools. Not that just having software makes you good at something, as a quick trip around the Web makes clear.
这个趋势再次说明廉价电脑正在淡化专业工具和业余工具之间的界限，这一点在音乐录制和图形设计领域已经得到体现。但只要在网路上转一转就会发现，仅仅有了软件还不足以成为高手。
Ms. Geraghty says that while she enjoys the comfort of her regular editing studio, a notebook is not without its charms. 'I could look out over a fishing harbor,' she says. 'It was the best view I've ever had from a cutting room.'
杰拉蒂说，虽然在常规剪辑工作室里感觉很舒适，但使用笔记本工作也别有一番情趣。“从窗户望出去，渔港美景近在眼前，这是过去我在剪辑室内从未享受过的，”她说。
Like 'Reservation Road,' the typical Hollywood feature film these days is an analog-digital hybrid. Reels of film might be developed at a lab such as Technicolor, but then $1.5 million scanners digitize them and put them on a $100 generic USB hard drive. From there, it's on to the editors.
如今，一般的好莱坞故事片都是以模拟－数字混合方式制作的，《救赎之路》就是其中之一。一卷卷胶片在Technicolor这样的工作室冲洗出来之后，扫描仪（售价高达150万美元）会对其进行数字化，保存在100美元的普通USB硬碟上，然后才进入剪辑环节。
Editing on computers is so much easier than editing physical film that it's how nearly all movies are now cut. USC's film school once had 50 editing consoles; now it has only two. Indeed, editing may have become too easy. 'You can easily recut your movie 10 times a day,' says Matt Furie, who teaches editing at USC. 'Some students go off the deep end and cut, cut, cut. We tell them they need to discipline themselves to push away from the desk, drop the mouse and just think.'
剪辑数字影片比剪辑胶片要简单得多，如今差不多所有电影都是用电脑剪辑的。USC电影学校原来有50台剪辑工作台，现在已经缩减为两台了。的确，剪辑可能变得太容易了。“你一天甚至能剪辑10次，”在USC教授剪辑的马特•富里(Matt Furie)说。“有些学生大刀阔斧地剪、剪、剪，我们总是提醒他们要控制自己，暂时离开桌子，放下鼠标，什么都不做，静静地思考。”
Like others, Mr. Furie suggests that one of the reasons there are so many rapid-fire cuts in today's movies is that editing software has made them so simple to do.
正如很多专业人士指出的那样，富里表示，目前出现大量剪辑粗糙的影片的原因正是在于编辑软件使得剪辑工作变得异常轻松。
