SilverWook said:

zombie, do you have any idea when video editing/post production became the norm for tv documentaries, even if shot on film?

Classic Creatures seems the odd man out of all the OOT docs, as it seems to have been finished up on video. 16mm copies of the others have been spotted in the wild.

I'm too young to have been around for that, I think it was in the late 1990s for video productions and film projects followed as hardware got better and cheaper; I guess when you started using it depended on the project, the budget, and those involved. Documentaries shot on video were probably cut on a computer as soon as they moved from analog tapes to digital in the mid-late 1990s, before that you would have had to do a conversion process to get it digital and the older electronic editing suites were okay once you got used to them, they gave you the same sort of non-linear functionality. I used one a few times when I was in highschool and found it the most frustrating thing in the world, but then I saw pros use them and it was second nature to them so I guess there is just a learning curve. I will say that when I started out in 2003 and 2004, cutting film on video using an AVID was still seen as a slightly new thing that a lot of older editors had only recently grappled with--things had changed very rapidly in the previous half decade--and the first thing I ever edited was 2004 and I cut it on a good old fashioned steenbeck. Later that year the facility I cut it on was trying to sell it, I would have bought it since it was only $1000 or something but it weighed as much as a small car (no joke) and I had no room for it.