Digital Intermediate Editor

Moviemaking is like baking: Both require combining ingredients to make finished products. As a Digital Intermediate Editor, therefore, you’re like a Baker, assembling the right ingredients — the scenes in a movie — and combining them into a finished film reel by following the Film Editor ’s recipe, which outlines which scenes go in what order.

Employed by a post-production company that specializes in digital processes, Digital Intermediate Editors are part of a relatively new method of making motion pictures, called “digital intermediate,” or “DI.” With DI, movies that once were finished manually are now finished digitally. That is: They’re filmed, digitized by film scanners, then manipulated electronically before being recorded back to film for distribution to theaters.

As part of this process, Digital Intermediate Editors do the digital equivalent of negative cutting, which was the traditional way of making movies, involving cutting individual frames out of camera negatives, then splicing them together to make a new, “edited” film reel. Thanks to technology, negatives no longer need to be physically cut and spliced; instead, they can be scanned into a computer and sorted into the correct order by special software that “conforms” them into the final edit. You’re in charge of this process, and also with “dust-busting” the digital film frames — painting out any dust particles that were scanned with the camera negatives — before they’re passed on to a Digital Intermediate Colorist for color correcting.

If you’re confused, think of it this way: A movie is the Director ’s messy room. While the Film Editor decides how the cleaned-up room should look, it’s your job to do the actual cleaning and organizing!