Eddie Hamilton
Film Editor
Dan Chung made his name in news photography and, more recently, videography. As a staff photographer and freelancer for The Guardian, he covered Iraq in 2003, post-tsunami Indonesia in 2004, and earthquake-ravaged Pakistan in 2006. While Chung might not have parlayed his degree in Geography into a career, his academic background certainly hasn't hurt during a life spent circling the world with a camera.
"You’re choosing the kind of emotional manipulation and journey you want to have. What we do, as storytellers and specifically as film editors, is try and make sure you get that experience."
Beyond working with Matthew Vaughn on "Kingsman: The Secret Service" film and its sequel, legendary film editor Eddie Hamilton also edited Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass, and over three-dozen others. He likens his job to culinary art: "If shooting footage is gathering ingredients, then editing is the preparation and cooking."
An average film will generate over 250 hours of raw footage. Eddie’s job is to distill this down to a mere two hours that will grab viewers and not let them go until the end. From Eddie’s perspective, "you’re buying an emotional experience when you buy a ticket for a film. You’re choosing the kind of emotional manipulation and journey you want to have. What we do, as storytellers and specifically as film editors, is try and make sure you get that experience. It’s a very, very hard thing to do well."
Eddie Hamilton’s journey into filmmaking began at seven, when he, like so many other kids, fell in love with Star Wars. Unlike most of those kids, though, Eddie paid attention to the end credits and realized that it took a lot of people to make a movie—hundreds of them, each performing different jobs.
"When I was 17," he says, "I realized that editing was an essential part of the process. I discovered that the combination of story-telling and technology appealed to my personality. I didn’t mind being alone in a room working for hours. Editing is a solitary job most of the time, then enormously collaborative at other times. That combination of being a nerd and loving computers, but also loving story-telling and especially filmmaking, appealed to me."
Unlike many of his colleagues, Eddie majored in psychology rather than film. Only his free time went toward editing student films and TV shows. After college, he landed a spot in a post-production facility and taught himself Avid Media Composer and all of its associated hardware. Then, Eddie started cutting low-budget, independent movies while paying the bills with freelance editing gigs, slowly building his expertise and career.
"It takes 10,000 hours—about four years of work—to reach the point where the technology becomes invisible and you can just focus on story-telling," he says. "It’s taken over 20 years for me to get to where I get a call about working on 'Mission: Impossible'."
On set, Eddie will pull QuickTime files from QTAKE, transcode them into Avid MXF files, and stash them on his 8TB G-Technology G-RAID with Thunderbolt. From there, he transports the G-RAID back to his editing suite and uploads the new footage into a 48TB RAID solution shared with seven other assistant editors. From that, the editing team works in Avid Media Composer to cut and shape the emerging story.
On a four-month shoot, Eddie might repeat this process 60 times, trusting his G-RAID to shuttle over 6TB from set to editing suite. Eddie sticks with the G-RAID for its blazing Thunderbolt 2 transfer speed, heavy-duty ruggedness in harsh set environments, removable hard drives, and dependability. He also appreciates the G-RAID with Thunderbolt’s out-of-the-box configuration in RAID 0 (striped) and its compact storage solution size, especially when working from a laptop in a remote location. With nearly 30 G-RAIDs in his collection, spanning four years of project editing, Eddie has yet to experience a single failure with the drive family. This was not the case with other brands he’s tried.
"Sometimes on location, the electricians cut the power before you’ve had time to shut down your computer. The laptop’s got a battery, but the drive dies and sometimes gets screwed up. That’s happened to me sometimes, and that particular time cost me hours of work. But I’ve never lost data in that situation with G-Technology drives. They are incredibly reliable. I breathe easier knowing the drives are going to be fine if power fails. For the small price premium that you pay over a cheap drive to an expensive drive, that peace of mind is worth it when you're working professionally. Any time wasted is costing a lot of money in that situation. That's basically why G-Technology drives have become almost a standard in the film industry for rugged location work."
Eddie aspires to work on films akin to "Star Wars," "Jurassic Park," or "Die Hard"—films that stand the test of time and contribute to human story-telling history. In the end, though, nothing matters more than a job well done and knowing that the work will withstand the test of many, many years. Eddie, too, is buying the experience he wants to have.
G-Team members are leaders in their respective fields who use G-Technology products in their day-to-day work lives. G-Team members are compensated for their participation.
G‐Technology external hard drives serve as an element of an overall backup strategy. It is recommended that users keep two or more copies of their most important files backed up or stored on separate devices or online services.
