Edit Suite: Deck Control, Once Over Lightly

Protocols are the hidden languages by which your VCRs and other editing hardware communicate via infrared pulses or electronic signals. In a way, they're like the chips that control your car's fuel injection: you're vaguely glad that they're doing their sophisticated thing in there someplace, but you don't care to know what that thing is.

Although that may be true about fuel injection, you need to understand editing protocols in two areas that directly affect your video post production: their compatibility and accuracy.

What Protocols Do
All editing protocols, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, use codes to control the operations of at least two VCRs, telling them when to go into their PLAY/PAUSE, PLAY, RECORD/PAUSE, RECORD, and STOP modes. By memorizing and then communicating strings of these codes, edit controllers can do two things:

• Perform edit sequences that would require an octopus to execute manually.
  
• Perform one edit after another to automatically assemble video programs.
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