Editing Continues to Evolve with Needful Things

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Cutting on the keyboard: feature film editing takes another step towards the digital future.

Editor Rob Kobrin is well-prepared for his position at the confluence of film, video and computers. Through the mid-1980s, he built up a wide range of postproduction experience, which led to a spot as an assistant to director John Avildsen on The Karate Kid. Avildsen, an editor himself, was using VHS videotape to pre-edit scenes. During this and other early experiments with video as an editing tool, Kobrin endured the fits and starts associated with the infancy of electronic nonlinear editing systems.

In 1988, Kobrin used the Ediflex editing system while serving as editorial …