Alex Eaton is owner/editor at Stealing Time in Toronto.

What does the future hold for commercial editing? Here are a few thoughts on the interesting impact technology is having on the field.

Firstly, the Internet is making the editing process more inclusive. Stealing Time recently acquired the ability to stream cuts in progress on our website. With this technology, we have gotten a director’s input from Los Angeles on a holiday weekend, shown a cut to a client in Vancouver an hour after it was agency-approved, had a creative director screen from up north and made four revisions in one day for an agency in Montreal to view. None of this would have been possible prior to this technology.

Within the next year, G3 wireless technology, which will carry motion video over the airwaves to cell phones and pdas (personal digital assistants), will be introduced. At that point, clients will be able to give their input from the dressing room at Holt’s – or wherever else they happen to be. This is not a replacement for sitting together in front of an Avid, but it allows for input that is presently unavailable (and occasionally unwanted).

The current trend in New York, according to Gillian McCarthy of Consulate (Stealing Time represents McCarthy in Canada), is flying editors in from England to cut projects. One shop represents an editor from Kuala Lumpur.

There are obvious costs associated with bringing in talent from abroad (editor’s fees in the u.s. and England are generally more than triple that of their Canadian peers). Some of these costs could be substantially reduced if the foreign editor was able to cut in his or her own edit suite with a link set up to a local offline house.

It’s not only the offline process that will be carried out in a ‘virtual’ fashion. With fibre-optic linking, telecine transfers will be viewed anywhere there’s a linked digital monitor. The negative could be on a scanner in Los Angeles with your editor and the superstar colorist of the moment. Or, it could be on a machine beside you, routed to a colorist in the u.k.

‘Why would creative teams in Toronto want to look elsewhere for editorial talent when there are tremendous talents here?’ you may ask. Yes, there are great editors here (just look to the Cannes award-winning Toyota ‘Dealers Can’t Jump’ or the visual splendor of the Eatons ‘Aubergine’ campaign), but there are also great directors in Canada that are regularly passed over for foreign talents. Fresh eyes make for fresh looks, they say.

Editing is about relationships, perhaps more than directing is, but it’s also about talent and vision. My hope is that we Canadian editors can tout our own talents in foreign markets while leading the technological revolution. *