Murch, Apple, and `Jarhead'

Renowned film editor Walter Murch talks about editing the new movie `Jarhead' in this promo piece on Apple's Web site. One interesting snip:

...[S]ince switching to digital nonlinear editing in the 90s, a process designed to make footage more easily accessible to editors, Murch had been struggling to see the eyes of the characters as clearly as he needed to. “Screen resolution has always been the weakest link in whatever digital system I was using,” he says. “So editing in high definition was something I was very eager to do.”

Murch also talks about sharing early versions of a sequence with Sam Mendes, the director:

As they assembled their edits, Murch and [associate editor Sean] Cullen regularly shared QuickTime files of their cuts with Mendes, who had moved on from Los Angeles to the Central Valley in California to shoot the bulk of the movie’s desert scenes.

“As we were going along we needed to get feedback from the director,” says Cullen. “So once a scene was cut we’d export a compressed version — still very high quality, better than SD but not full 720p — using a system called PIX [Product Information Exchange], an online hosted system for sharing information designed for the film industry. So we could simply upload a QuickTime movie to PIX and it would send an email to Sam saying he had a cut to look at. He could watch it on his PowerBook 20 minutes after we cut, whereas with tape it would have taken a day.”

Murch is the editor of a few pics you might've seen, such as `The Godfather Part II,' `Apocalypse Now,' and `The Talented Mr. Ripley.' (Thanks to DVGuru for the link.)