Nineteen years ago, I first heard about the possibility of editing video on a regular home computer. One of my friends was cutting together anime images using Movie Maker, the most basic editing software at the time, which ran on Windows XP. A bit later, one of my classmates added music to a recording from a school trip, and I was curious how he did it. It must have been around 2008 when I got a copy of Sony Vegas Pro 9 from one of my classmates. From the very first moment, I enjoyed playing around with it — discovering things on my own and figuring out how everything worked.
Back then, there weren’t many tutorials on YouTube, so I had to learn most things on my own. I couldn’t stop experimenting with the editing software, and for the past 16 years, I’ve been editing almost every day.
In 2009, Róbert Csaba Szabó, then head of the NMD dance department, asked me to improve a single-camera recording filmed at the “Dalfesztivál” talent show. Although it wasn’t really recommended to crop digitally in post-production, I divided the single Full HD shot into several frames and cut it as dynamically as I could. Perhaps the high-level reworking of this video was what made people start noticing my work.
In 2016, I began gradually transitioning to Adobe Premiere, and by 2019 I switched to DaVinci Resolve, which I’ve been using for all my projects ever since. Since 2012, I have edited more than 150 multi-camera theatre performances, short films, music videos, concert recordings, commercials, feature films, and many other creative works.
In many cases, an editor’s task is not only to tell the story but also to maximize the aesthetic presentation of the material. So first, I’d like to show you a recording where the lack of proper lighting on location was a major disadvantage, yet I had to achieve the most dynamic and visually pleasing result possible through post-production.
In 2023, I created a new trailer for my feature film "Too Expensive Blunder" (2016),
which I believe easily meets international ACE standards.
I had to create aftermovies for multiple events organized in different locations across the city.
Since 2012, I have filmed and edited numerous high-quality multi-camera recordings of theatre performances for the Szigligeti Theatre in Oradea.
The dawn of the moving image
The dawn of the moving image was not a birth of stories, but a capture of moments. In those flickering frames of the late nineteenth century, the camera remained a static observer, anchored to the floorboards of history. When the Lumière brothers projected their shorts, there was no cutting, no shifting of perspective, and no manipulation of time. The film began when the hand crank started turning and ended when the celluloid ran dry. These were views, not visions.
The transition from a mere recording of reality to the art of narrative construction required a fundamental reimagining of what a strip of film could represent. It was Georges Méliès, a magician by trade, who first unlocked the transformative power of the edit. Through his accidental discovery of the substitution splice, he realized that film was not a continuous ribbon of truth but a collection of fragments that could be rearranged to defy the laws of physics. By stopping the camera, changing the scene, and restarting the mechanism, he birthed the jump cut, proving that the editor’s shears could serve as a wand to conjure the impossible.
As the medium entered the first decade of the twentieth century, the language of cinema began to find its syntax. Edwin S. Porter, working within the laboratory of Thomas Edison, took the experiments of Méliès further by introducing the concept of continuity. In his landmark work, the camera no longer watched a single event from a single vantage point. Instead, he pieced together shots taken at different times and locations to form a cohesive timeline. He understood that the audience could follow a character from an interior room to an exterior street, provided the shots were joined with a logical progression. This was the birth of the scene as a modular unit of storytelling.
However, the true revolution of narrative editing arrived with the realization that film could represent simultaneous actions. Parallel editing, popularized by D.W. Griffith, allowed the storyteller to weave two separate threads of drama into a single emotional tapestry. By cutting back and forth between a victim in peril and a hero in pursuit, Griffith discovered that the frequency of the edits could dictate the pulse of the audience. The shorter the shots became, the faster the heart beat. Editing was no longer just a way to link scenes; it was a tool to manipulate the very biological response of the viewer.
While the Americans were refining the logic of the narrative arc, a group of visionaries in the young Soviet Union began to look at the edit as a weapon of intellectual and emotional impact. Lev Kuleshov conducted experiments that proved the meaning of a shot is not found within the frame itself but in its relationship to the shot that precedes it. An actor’s neutral expression could represent hunger, grief, or desire depending entirely on what the editor chose to show next. This phenomenon, known as the Kuleshov Effect, laid the groundwork for Soviet Montage.
Sergei Eisenstein took these theories to their most aggressive heights. He viewed the edit not as a smooth transition, but as a collision of independent ideas that sparked a new thought in the mind of the spectator. To Eisenstein, the cut was a rhythmic explosion. Narrative editing became a rhythmic, dialectical process where the juxtaposition of images created a metaphoric depth that a single shot could never achieve. Through his work, the editor became a philosopher, using the rhythm of the blade to comment on the nature of society and human struggle.
As Hollywood entered its Golden Age, the goal of narrative editing shifted toward invisibility. The industry developed the continuity system, a set of rigid rules designed to hide the fact that a film was a construction of thousands of pieces. The 180-degree rule, the match on action, and the eyeline match ensured that the viewer remained submerged in the dream of the story without being distracted by the mechanics of the craft. The editor became a ghost, working in the shadows to create a seamless flow of time and space that felt as natural as a heartbeat.
The mid-twentieth century brought a shattering of these conventions. The French New Wave, led by directors like Jean-Luc Godard, began to fracture the polished surface of traditional cinema. By intentionally using jump cuts and breaking the rules of continuity, these filmmakers reminded the audience that they were watching a film. This self-reflexive approach to editing proved that narrative did not have to be linear or logical to be profound. The edit could be a jagged, nervous expression of the modern psyche.
With the advent of the digital era, the physical tactile nature of the craft vanished, replaced by the infinite malleability of non-linear editing systems. The labor of the Moviola and the smell of cement were traded for the precision of the pixel. Today, the history of narrative editing remains a testament to the power of selection. It is the art of deciding what to leave in and, more importantly, what to cut away. From the first crude splices of Méliès to the complex algorithmic rhythms of the modern blockbuster, the edit remains the soul of the cinema, the invisible hand that guides us through the dark.
