If Apple’s introduction of Final Cut Pro in 1999 was a landmark in the post industry, it’s less notable for its inroads in mainstream Hollywood (best exemplified by Walter Murch’s Final Cut workflow on Cold Mountain) than for its enabling impact on independent filmmakers, who found that not only was Apple’s new toy a pretty cool piece of software on its own, but its presence as a disruptive force in the market brought out the best in its competitors.

The new breed of affordable desktop NLEs has also spurred new thinking among creatives. Indies are using them because they’re cost-effective ‘ and when filmmakers are strapped for cash, they start working even more creatively with the tools available to them. To find out more about how these tools are being used in the feature-film realm, Film & Video interviewed a trio of filmmakers who took movies to Sundance this year, asking them about technology, the creative process, and how careers in film editing are changing.

Editor Zene Baker, who’s worked three times with American indie wunderkind David Gordon Green and cut two different Sundance films this year, told us about life on a low budget and identified sources of creative inspiration; Conversations with Other Women executive producer/post supervisor/digital compositor Kwesi Collisson described the execution of (spoilers!) a tricky taxi-cab scene that takes place on a split screen; and editor Robert Hoffman revealed how he flexed his own compositing muscles to dramatically alter scenes, right in the Avid, for director Terry Zwigoff and Art School Confidential.