Back in the day when motion pictures became possible, editing wasn’t even necessary as they basically recorded day-to-day imagery. It wasn’t until the late 1800s when the Lumiere Brothers created their own camera, which spawned other inventions to follow suit. In 1908, D.W Griffiths made the first movie featuring a scene cut and the rest, as they say, was history. Many of the editing techniques that Griffiths featured in his films went on to be part and parcel of Hollywood.
While everyone knows Hollywood and how they revolutionised not only an entire industry, but the technology that went along with it, very little is known about digital editing which only came around in 1924. The first device that allowed people to view their video during post-production video editing, which includes the common transitions that we see today - fading, scene swipe, etc, all of which were impossible with the linear editing methods of the past. The device, named Moviola, is an invention by Iwan Serrurier. While it is a far cry from the technology that we have today, it was an innovation of its time, using motorised disks or plates which allowed both picture and sound to be synchronised.
Video editing is done through a computer or - as mentioned earlier - through a mobile device. With modern applications, editing has gotten much more convenient as compared to the editing technology of days past. The software is intuitive and makes analogue video tape-to-tape editing a thing of the past. The intuitive softwares of video editing in our mobile devices is able to edit as you record, spawning lots of creative new ways to create transitions and edit videos. To be fair, editing has always been a show of creativity and a keen eye for detail - how can you make something look cool and engaging without having the big budget of Hollywood studios? These trends of organic transitions have caught on with Hollywood, and instead of using fancy CGI or special effects, consumers are much more invested in color scheme and overall mise en scene or content.
