Cutting.
The term cutting is just a slang term for editing. It is derived from the way old film reels used to be cut in order to edit them. Everybody has heard this term even if only when referring to shots cutting away or cutting to another. Editors are also sometimes referred to as Cutters in keeping with the theme.
Montage
A montage is a series of shots put together in a sequence. In the Techniques of Editing blog I have posted I have written about the Kuleshov effect and how it is the principle for montage. Montages are used to create a meaning that the viewer clearly mediates without the images having to completely spell it out for them. Classicly montages are used in films to show the passing of time, with shots of a person looking young or commonly a novice at a certain skill. Shots of the slightly older person or that person becoming better at whatever skill they were a novice at in the first shots moves the narrative along without any need for a shot by shot account of time or practice. I have posted a link below to the Team America Montage Song which, while being a parody of the montage technique, actually explains it pretty well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU9Uwhjlog8&feature=related
Frame/Frame Rate
This is slightly complicated. Frames are the still images that when put together make up moving images. The amount of these images that occur in a single second is usually abbreviated to FPS with the letters standing for Frames Per Second. The more images in a single second the better the fluidity of the moving image that they create. Confused? The informal and much easier way to get your head around this is to think of a cartoon that someone has drawn on a notepad in the corner of the page. They then turn over the page and draw the same cartoon but slightly more advanced in the timeline, so if the first image was of a stick figure walking towards a car, then the next image would show him slightly closer to the car. The images would be continuously drawn on a different piece of paper until the cartoon has finished and then you would flick through the pages to see every still image coming straight after the other one. When these still images are shown very very briefly and very very quickly next to each other they create a moving image. So going back to the beginning a frame in this case is one of the pages that the cartoon is drawn on and the frame rate would be (x) frames per second the number of pages that were seen in one second. (8)
There are different FPS used in film and TV. This depends where in the world you are viewing from and what analog system that part of the world uses. There are three main frame rate standards but as technology moves forward there are new standards emerging, but for editing purposes only two are really needed. First there is PAL which is the analog TV system that stands for Phase Alternate Line. It is used all over the world, mainly in Europe and most of Asia and Africa. The frame rate for PAL is 25 FPS. The second most used system is NTSC which stands for National Television Standard Committee runs at 29.97 FPS(the reason they felt the need to have such an usual number of frames a second is anybody's guess). The last of the big three is called SECAM, also written SÉCAM which stands for Séquentiel couleur à mémoire, French for Sequential Colour with Memory. It too has a frame rate of 25 FPS. (9) This is used in France and Russia as well as some African countries. Below is a link to an image that clearly shows which places use which particular system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg
Films, or at least most Hollywood productions anyway, are produced at 24 FPS. This is slightly lower than TV but is still enough to satisfy the human eye. (9)
Now I am aware that there is a lot of information here and you may be wondering what it has to with chopping up some clips and putting them in the right order. The fact is editing is about precision and timing. Each frame is important and how good your final piece is often depends on how carefully you time your cuts and the duration of them. Knowing that 24 FPS is what the human eye is content with lets you play around with individual frames to achieve certain creative flair and styles. It also helps greatly with sound effects and soundtracks. A lot of the sound in film and TV is done in the editing room and there may be a scene where a character is startled by a noise. The editor has to find the right time to put the noise in and can match up the actors actions with each frame and this gives him/her an idea of where the sound should go so it syncs with the images perfectly. It is possible to do all of this with total disregard for frames and their importance but the fact is any work done with that attitude will fall short of any kind of quality.
Frame/Frame Rate
This is slightly complicated. Frames are the still images that when put together make up moving images. The amount of these images that occur in a single second is usually abbreviated to FPS with the letters standing for Frames Per Second. The more images in a single second the better the fluidity of the moving image that they create. Confused? The informal and much easier way to get your head around this is to think of a cartoon that someone has drawn on a notepad in the corner of the page. They then turn over the page and draw the same cartoon but slightly more advanced in the timeline, so if the first image was of a stick figure walking towards a car, then the next image would show him slightly closer to the car. The images would be continuously drawn on a different piece of paper until the cartoon has finished and then you would flick through the pages to see every still image coming straight after the other one. When these still images are shown very very briefly and very very quickly next to each other they create a moving image. So going back to the beginning a frame in this case is one of the pages that the cartoon is drawn on and the frame rate would be (x) frames per second the number of pages that were seen in one second. (8)
There are different FPS used in film and TV. This depends where in the world you are viewing from and what analog system that part of the world uses. There are three main frame rate standards but as technology moves forward there are new standards emerging, but for editing purposes only two are really needed. First there is PAL which is the analog TV system that stands for Phase Alternate Line. It is used all over the world, mainly in Europe and most of Asia and Africa. The frame rate for PAL is 25 FPS. The second most used system is NTSC which stands for National Television Standard Committee runs at 29.97 FPS(the reason they felt the need to have such an usual number of frames a second is anybody's guess). The last of the big three is called SECAM, also written SÉCAM which stands for Séquentiel couleur à mémoire, French for Sequential Colour with Memory. It too has a frame rate of 25 FPS. (9) This is used in France and Russia as well as some African countries. Below is a link to an image that clearly shows which places use which particular system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg
Films, or at least most Hollywood productions anyway, are produced at 24 FPS. This is slightly lower than TV but is still enough to satisfy the human eye. (9)
Now I am aware that there is a lot of information here and you may be wondering what it has to with chopping up some clips and putting them in the right order. The fact is editing is about precision and timing. Each frame is important and how good your final piece is often depends on how carefully you time your cuts and the duration of them. Knowing that 24 FPS is what the human eye is content with lets you play around with individual frames to achieve certain creative flair and styles. It also helps greatly with sound effects and soundtracks. A lot of the sound in film and TV is done in the editing room and there may be a scene where a character is startled by a noise. The editor has to find the right time to put the noise in and can match up the actors actions with each frame and this gives him/her an idea of where the sound should go so it syncs with the images perfectly. It is possible to do all of this with total disregard for frames and their importance but the fact is any work done with that attitude will fall short of any kind of quality.
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