Yesterday I posted a short piece about how Elmo Williams‘ cutting of the famous High Noon tick-tock sequence has always bothered me slightly. It was edited to match Dimitri Tiomkin‘s music, and so every cut was supposed to happen at the precise instant of the final beat…except it doesn’t quite do that. Today editor Matthew Morettini wrote to say the reason for my slight irritation is that the picture is four frames ahead of the music. But now Morettini has fixed it. “I’m a professional editor and had a few minutes on my hands today and re-synced the clip the way I always felt it should be,” he wrote. “And guess what? It’s better. Each and every picture edit was exactly four frames early.” Compare the Morettini version (top) to the Elmo Williams version (below). For the first time in 63 years, this famous montage has finally been cut right.

Matthew Morettini 2015 version:

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Elmo Williams 1952 version: