"Now that I can edit the whole thing on AVID and edit the whole thing on tape, maybe I will do the next digitally, because maybe the quality will become less obvious between tape and film"
About this Quote
Apted is talking like a director caught mid-gearshift, when craft collides with technology and the ego has to renegotiate what “quality” even means. His sentence lurches forward with maybes because the stakes are oddly personal: he’s not just choosing a workflow, he’s choosing which standards will govern his taste. AVID and tape editing aren’t presented as shiny toys; they’re proof that he’s already living in a hybrid world, one foot in the tactile discipline of film, the other in the speed-and-control promise of digital.
The key phrase is “less obvious.” That’s not a celebration of progress so much as a pragmatic surrender to perception. Apted is tracking the point where audiences stop noticing the difference, and once that happens, the moral authority of film purity evaporates. He’s admitting that medium prestige is partly a social agreement: film looks “better” until it doesn’t read as better to the people watching, or to the post-production pipeline shaping it.
Context matters: Apted came up in an era where film wasn’t just a format, it was a professional identity, with hierarchies baked in (film for “cinema,” tape for “TV”). By framing digital as something he “maybe will do,” he lets himself change without sounding like he’s betraying a creed. The subtext is survival-by-adaptation: when your editing becomes non-linear, your schedule accelerates, your budget expectations shift, and suddenly the romanticism of celluloid has to compete with deadlines. The quote captures that historical hinge when technology didn’t just offer new tools; it rewrote what counted as craftsmanship.
The key phrase is “less obvious.” That’s not a celebration of progress so much as a pragmatic surrender to perception. Apted is tracking the point where audiences stop noticing the difference, and once that happens, the moral authority of film purity evaporates. He’s admitting that medium prestige is partly a social agreement: film looks “better” until it doesn’t read as better to the people watching, or to the post-production pipeline shaping it.
Context matters: Apted came up in an era where film wasn’t just a format, it was a professional identity, with hierarchies baked in (film for “cinema,” tape for “TV”). By framing digital as something he “maybe will do,” he lets himself change without sounding like he’s betraying a creed. The subtext is survival-by-adaptation: when your editing becomes non-linear, your schedule accelerates, your budget expectations shift, and suddenly the romanticism of celluloid has to compete with deadlines. The quote captures that historical hinge when technology didn’t just offer new tools; it rewrote what counted as craftsmanship.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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