Jim Simon wrote:Many would say George Lucas' wife Marcia is the reason Star Wars became such a cultural phenomenon. She won the Oscar for Best Editing.
Not exactly true. She made key suggestions at critical moments, but the vast majority of the work was all George. I worked for him for almost four months and Lucas is the most hyper-focused of any director I've ever seen on editing and timing -- he knows that process backwards, forwards, and sideways. Read Paul Hirsch's recent book
A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away, which tells the real story of how
Star Wars and
Empire Strikes Back were edited. Hirsch did the vast majority of the editing on both pictures, and Lucas literally said to him at the premiere, "thank you for saving my movie."
As to OFX: I have everything clogging my Resolve station, and we invested in BorisFX, Sapphire, Neat Video, Scatter, Filmbox, Ignite, the works. (Basically everything except New Blue, which always seemed too buggy to me.) I figure out which ones I use the most, make them favorites, and kind of ignore everything else. I've been using ResolveFX ContrastPop a lot more often lately, and it's basically Midtone on steroids: lots of interesting controls in there. Plug-Ins make a huge difference, particularly when you want a strikingly different look, or you're trying to help an actor look a little more glamorous, or when you're desperately trying to salvage some ugly footage. I keep 2 nodes open for OFX all the time in my node tree, and while they stay empty most of the time, sometimes they wind up being extremely necessary.