Over the past few years, video technology has been used to assist film directors after they have shot a scene, to control costs, and to create special effects, especially computer assisted graphics. At present, a computer based editing system called "Film 5" combines computer technology and video tape with film to save as much as 50% of the cost of conventional film editing processes. Filmmaker George Lucas has a group working to provide future services to filmmakers in the areas of a database for film production, a digital sound process, computer graphics, and video editing. Unlike Lucas, filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola stresses the ways technological efficiency can encourage human and creative processes in filmmaking. His "electronic cinema" concept uses information processing systems to blend the currently separate processes of preproduction, production, and postproduction. Besides their use in generating more sophisticated computer graphics in such films as "Tron," computerized video assisted production techniques currently under development will soon revolutionize the cinema. (JL)