The Result: A Clear, Steep Climb in Speed Over the Years

Through the ’50s, the average rate was 12 cuts per minute. Since the ’90s? Thirty-eight.

That trajectory is easily explained by the evolution of editing technologies. Linear editing systems were once the standard: Editors painstakingly spliced together pieces of film or, later, copied video from one tape to another. “When I started in 1990, there were still people cutting on film in the trailer business—though most people were on tape-to-tape systems,” says Michael McIntyre, head of creative agency mOcean.

Starting in the early ’90s, though, editors began switching to computers with the rest of the world. In the course of about three years, digital systems—mostly Avid—became de rigueur for video editing. These are so-called nonlinear systems: Editors can grab shots from any point in a film’s progression and drag them into a new timeline. There were some holdouts dedicated to the old linear systems until the late ’90s, but the new system’s impact was clear: The future was fast.

But just because digital editing made it easy doesn’t mean that seizure-inducing cuts are solely a product of technology. Pablo Ferro’s trailer for Dr. Strangelove, released in 1964, had by far the fastest editing of all the trailers we watched—and we’d venture to guess, of all trailers ever made. Among trailer editors, it’s universally known as an artistic triumph, not just a technical one.

A frantic editing pace can do more than pander to our Adderall-addled minds. While fast cuts sometimes do seem to be there only to cram in as many wham-pow action sequences as possible—we’re looking at you, Pirates of the Caribbean—the technology that makes them possible is just so much more clay for editors to work with.