You know, normally I prefer to plan ahead a full email post on the main publication Indulging a Second Look as opposed to spout off some off-the-cuff thoughts to Substack’s Notes social media timeline, but today I was thinking about some “life and work of a video editor” things that I felt subscribers might find enriching, and were just a tad too in-the-weeds for Notes engagement.
Editing covers many different tasks over the full course of a video or movie workflow, and there’s plenty of articles and other content out there you can read to break down those workflows and what individual people’s roles are, but I also think of them as different skill buckets requiring different types of attention.
It goes without saying that different editors will like or dislike the various buckets to different degrees, and possibly be better or worse at the buckets to different degrees; but an editor does have to be professionally competent in every bucket to function long term in the career. I would say you have to find your own enjoyment in each of these processes too, or eventually you will burn out.
On the other hand, editor culture can sometimes be grumpy and editors like to share some complaints about things that, ironically, is basically their core job function. I personally find it funny — I think every job has its constituent amount of grousing, and I don’t think jobs can really exist without stress. The way to survive any endeavor long-term is to have more eustress than distress, but each have their own level of bitching.
So I thought it would be fun to introduce these buckets, editors’ primary complaints about those aspects of the job, and then the reason they’re actually fun really. Then the difference between a filmmaker who needs to edit something and an editor is the difference between whether you’re grousing for fun or actually really can’t cope with handling this responsibility.
They’re arranged sort of in order of project workflow. Sort of. This is not a general workflow guide.
Skill Set 1: Media Management
This is everything that involves organizing, labelling, and preparing the actual media assets, every type of file that affects how they are interpreted by the editing program, and how the editing program itself is formatted for editing particular types of film, video, and video-adjacent content.
A note that historically, “editors” actually didn’t need to do a lot of this, as post production had a large system of assistants, post-producers, and various other helpers and gofers to present editors with cleanly structured and ready-to-edit project files. I have never seen this in the wild and these days only hear tales of it from grizzled old hands who refuse to take a job unless some 20-year-old does half their job for them and that 20-year-old was around in the days where “non-linear editing” meant running a system of reels on tape.
In my personal experience, if you don’t know how to manage media yourself, you’re not gonna crack it at this editing thing these days.
Common grousing: “This isn’t my job, I should be editing right now.” “Who the fuck labelled these clips?” “These people do not understand nomenclature.” “This folder is garbage, there is no organization in this project whatsoever.” “I have literally never seen this filetype before, whereven did they find this asset?” “But why can’t proxies have more than four channels of audio?”
Skills required: Patience; organizational skills; minor technical and troubleshooting skills; translating workflow technical documents and creative style guide documents into literal hierarchies of bins and sequences; watching things like render bars, transcripts, previews, and proxies load without losing your mind.
Why it’s fun actually: You can listen to music. You can make sure your project file and everything it connects to looks and feels the way you want it. You can get excited by the possibilities. You can fall down Internet rabbit-holes about obscure codecs trying to solve a transcoding problem and end up feeling like you’ve peered into the underlying databit information structure of the universe. You can feel like you’re getting away with wasting time on company / client dime when you damn well know you’re saving dozens if not hundreds of hours of workflow problems downstream and actually making everyone’s lives easier and happier. You are packaging a gift for your future editor self.
Skill Set 2: Stringouts, Assemblies, and Selects
This is where you go through all the beautifully, cleanly organized assets in the project file and start mucking them up in order to chop the chaff away.
You group multicamera shoots and nest sequences, create b-roll or dailies stringouts to send to clients to look at and for you to grab from later, place markers all over the timeline, make clips all sorts of pretty colors according to a schema that helps you find important things, and even, if you’re super brash, delete clips you damn well know will offer nary one single frame in the final cut from the project file1.
This section is distinct from media management because it’s about the content of the media itself rather than its containers. It’s the part where you’re facing effectively infinite possibilities and choosing the first pathways.
I’m also counting in this bucket things like creating the first assembly cuts from scripty notes.
Common grousing: “Who shot this? How did they even get hired?”2 “Oh my god, if I’ve told them once I’ve told them a million times, if you can’t genlock then use a slate!” Premiere specific, “Seriously how have they figured out AI clip extension but I still can’t batch sync audio? Fuck this I’m using Resolve.” “Okay I guess they call this b-roll, but like, it would be nice if it had anything to do with the subject matter.” “Yup. Two different camera bodies at different color temperatures and exposure levels, shot up against a window during a windy partly-cloudy day. Coloring this is gonna suck.”
Skills required: Patience; organizational skills; ‘an eye’ for high quality moments, performances, and compositions; consistency and clarity of communication; basic project management and team management; team coordination; workflow management and design; clear high level evaluation of noise to signal ratios regarding your specific project needs.
Why it’s fun actually: Flat-out, do you like puzzles? Do you like Lego or building blocks or collage? This is processing art, where you’re both familiarizing yourself with the content, creating a larger view ‘master plan’ of the art you’re preparing to make, and also letting it wind into your subconscious as you move the pieces around. I swear half this job is the actual mouse clicking and hotkeys, the other half is done while you sleep and your short-term memory cache decompresses. You also get to get excited when you do, actually, see some beautiful shots or performances or just rad content your team put together and you’re like, “Yes, this is gonna be fun.” You’re planting the story seed.
Skill Set 3: Story and creative editing
This is the part of editing called editing, commonly associated with editing, and is what you’ll see an ‘editor’ in a movie doing if you see a movie that shows an editor editing (you’ll never see a high-octane snappy edit of an editor ingesting footage and confirming proxy transcode settings).
It technically consists of two vastly different responsibilities: cutting, and storytelling.3 Cutting is the assembling of image and sound together in a sensible order that tells a story, and storytelling is making editorial decisions about what story to tell.
An oversimplistic way to say this is cutting is deciding where to place a reaction shot to a line of dialog, storytelling is deciding whether that line of dialog even belongs in the final movie. As this is a vast subject with many books written about it, I will settle the distinction there.
I’m going to talk a little bit about AI in the next section, but this is the section that is relatively AI-risk free. AI can do some specific and narrowly defined types of cutting. It can’t do any type of storytelling. AI tools will only help the cutting constituent to how well the AI tool designers bother to listen and engage with the people who use them.
Common grousing: “Noooo, they didn’t get it! They didn’t actually get the shot!” “Ugh, settle. Settle! Did they even bring stabilization?” “The hell did they shoot this near, an active fire station under construction and hosting a concert? This audio is garbage.” “Ugh continuity. Ugh. Continuity. Oh here we go… nope. Fuck sandwiches.” “They didn’t get the insert? I’m not gonna crop in. Will look like shit.” “Yeah just you know leave the coffee cup in frame, no viewer will notice, no one will comment about it. /s” “Ya can’t polish a turd.” “Yeahhhh…. this guy is uh… not television ready.” “Framefuck it.”
Skills required: Patience. Taste. The eye. How to tell a story. A severely critical ear for dialog, interview, and voiceover on the fundamental what-words-actually-mean and what-people-will-understand level. How to tell a story. A long memory for lost and forgotten takes. An uncanny intuition for when the person on screen is about to stop doing the thing. An unconscious muscle memory codex of hotkeys you use without even remembering what the key combinations are or what the function is called anymore. Eye tracing. Eye lines.4 How to tell a story.
Why it’s fun actually: I mean this is what people get into the editing for, so you better be just really taking joy from the process or please just hire an editor. Also you get praised for good editing, which is not true of any of the other skill sets on this list. And you get your own sense of personal ownership of the final story, no matter what the director says at the Q&A.
Skill Set 4: Taking notes and client engagement
This is the section that causes the most noisy editor grousing, which I don’t like because I learned very early in my career how to give this skill area equal weight to the beloved actual-editing area above, and sometimes I beef with how often editors beef with clients. Editing IS a customer service job, and one of my most frequently praised traits from former and returning clients is my calmness and responsiveness in dealing with their notes, worries, and concerns.
This also isn’t to say that the client’s note should always be taken. This skillset includes being able to convince clients, occasionally, on the better path; or show them that path so they can convince themselves; or realizing that their belief that one thing is a problem is actually a separate problem somewhere else on the timeline.
This part of the job is translating the client’s pain-points into opportunities for elegance. As such I find some editors’ complaints and disrespect about clients is sometimes a red flag to that individual’s actual editing skills.
Lastly, this is the skillset that is entirely, 100% AI-risk free. Sorry tech bros, but the reason clients can’t edit for themselves is not because they don’t understand the buttons or the program or anything—editing is, actually, very easy on a ‘this thing does that’ level—it’s because your job as an editor is to prompt them, not vice versa.
The creative skills and responsibilities that make a producer or a client is not only different than an editor’s creative skills and responsibilities, in some cases they’re non-overlapping magisteria. The reasons why clients can’t already edit for themselves are the exact same reasons why they can’t formulate prompts that would successfully instruct a machine on how to do it for them.
There’s just no AI system that will ever translate “Make it pop” prompts into solving the actual lack of ‘pop’ the client feels. My favorite quote on this matter is a dumb BusinessWeek adage, but nevertheless it is the job: “So their complaint is wrong? Then their complaint is wrong. Their pain is real, even if it doesn’t make sense.”
Another useful quote is that, “Clients give you what they think the solution is. It’s your job to figure out what the problem is from there to find the real solution.” AI cannot do this, we’re not even talking AGI level mere consciousness but prosocial theory-of-mind shit. The things you understand if you learn human relationships.
All the above said, in any collaborative situation you’re going to have communication issues, disagreement, and time spent going back and forth over how to solve a problem instead of just sitting down and solving the problem. 90% of conflict is merely definitional: people being unaware they’re not even talking about the same things, and thus misinterpreting the other person’s statements.
Common grousing: “If I change that, I have to change everything!” “WHY WOULD THEY WANT THAT CUT—— that’s the best part!” “I can’t use footage they never shot.” “THIS! THIS is why you never just say, ‘We’ll fix it in post!’” “Yes, I’ll just use the ‘make it pop’ plug-in.” “Seriously, she just sat there right behind me watching me framefuck clips back and forth, like I’m just some meat extension of her brain to edit with herself.” “I literally do not know what this guy’s problem is.” “We can’t fit the full five minute clip in this 2:30 video, sorry.”
Skills required: Patience. Creative listening. Emotional management and empathy. Customer service. Ability to explain yourself clearly. Ability to choose battles and know when to let go. Ability to admit when you’re wrong. Ability to persuade when you’re right. Personal hygiene. A clean and orderly workspace. Ability to attend meetings, write emails, and hold phone conversations.
Why it’s fun actually: Collaboration. Collaborative game theory: if you win, everyone wins; if they win, you win. Praise; and, if you’re really good at your job, respect. Learning new things, accepting new challenges. Having a new person to talk about your favorite movies with, when that one cut “reminds you of…”. A built-in audience for your work. New friends.
Bonus fun actually: Personally? I sometimes like having a checklist of tasks to do the creative editing with rather than having to be entirely self-directed, so rounds of review and feedback can sometimes help you really get in the zone in a way where the first rough or larger bulk of editing can feel overwhelming.
Skill Set 5: Finishing editing and QC
Technically this could have been included in the media management section ,but I think there’s a completely different technical world and attention mindset you need to get into when you are packaging, exporting, and distributing a project. This one is one of the few buckets that I actively do not recommend editors do to their own work, because editors can become blind to their own errors through sheer familiarity of the content.
Finishing editing and QC is assembling the final product with all of its mastered parts: the final, colored, SFX composited, graphics-overlaid visual component and it’s fully mixed-down and mastered sound design exported into every format and type of file required across every platform it will go to, and every type of sidecar and embedded media and metadata file that goes with it.
During this you have to be constantly checking that every element remains exactly where it belongs, no glitches or errors occur in any part of the process, no mistakes are burnt into the final result, the outputs are indeed to the specifications required (which often requires some other ‘monitor’ than the editing program you’re using), and in some cases you have to be able to watch your work — no matter how long it is — over and over again about a half dozen times without your eyes glazing over.
Common grousing: “Mother. Fucking. Dropframe.” “Why did it export like that?” “How did no one see that?!”5 “Magnets. How do they work?” “[Deep intake of breath] Captions are not subtitles. They are a completely different protocol.” “Captions are fragile, don’t mess with the captions.” “Ugh, fucking captions.” “I fucking hate captions.” “This is not how it looked on the other monitor.” “Oh, this whole time we were editing in REC2020 color space goddamnit.” “…. I … mannnn…unbelievable. I forgot that one checkbox. AGAIN.”
Skills required: Patience. A very intense eye for detail. Babysitting render bars without losing your mind. An ability to memorize a cornucopia of technical terminology, 75% of which have names like 608-1, Rec709, MXF, LKFS, and PAR.6 Intuitive and reflexive knowledge on how to reduce moire, artifacting, jutter, aliasing, banding, and other weird shit nobody knows about but every lay person can see. Technical troubleshooting skills. The ability to translate extremely detailed and thorough specifications documents into buttons and checkboxes hidden in sub-sub-sub-menus most editors daren’t tread. If you can swing it, programming and debugging skills. If you’re a superstar, video engineering skills, but that’s asking a lot.
Sadly this is an area I also excel at moreso than many editors so I’ve become the go-to “Dane, why is this broken?” guy at every editing job I’ve had for the past decade.
Why it’s fun actually: You’re a fucking wizard to most people. You can call a random master control person or engineering type video dude across the country and hold a full phone conversation that sounds like arcane psychobabble from the maddening void. You become very hard to replace, and there is high demand for editors that can figure this shit out. Occasionally troubleshooting becomes an adventure and you learn some really wild and random stuff about things you didn’t ever conceive existed. Adobe actually takes your reports and assigns an engineer to you.7 Occasionally occasionally…… occasionally!: a video engineer will respect you, and that means the world.
Why it sucks actually: Every business or client you work for will progressively push you away from the actual editing editing and towards this because you’re the only one they know who can do it. You will have to constantly push back so that you can do the other stuff.
Skill Set 6: Paperwork, project management, and… business
Guess what? Editing is an office job.
Every asset has metadata on a computer level, but it also has metadata on a human communication and exchange level; frequently financial and legal! An easy example is music cue sheets, tracking literally every music track you used and the amount of time it is heard on-screen to the second, a requirement for making sure your production doesn’t get super sued.
But every job has their trackers, their reports, their KPIs, not to mention HR documentation, timesheets, benefits management, election periods. Sometimes you live in the world of CMSs or MRCs or anything that takes a .csv, and yes this is not just alphabet soup you’ll learn against your will but is not as universally applied cross-industry, less across industries, as you’d like, meaning that every new work place is a brand new pile of paperwork terminology.
And spreadsheets. I do not believe it is possible to be a professional editor without becoming intimately familiar with spreadsheets, on the “Oh wow I didn’t know spreadsheets could do that!” statements from your clients level.
Many larger post-houses have post-supervisors, post-producers, and post-managers, but most of the time you have to do a lot of that stuff yourself and be as much of a boss to your clients as your clients are your boss.
And if you freelance and work from home etc, you are running a independent business and have to know how to file taxes and hire entertainment lawyers and accountants and generally keep your own ship afloat with no boatswain to blame for capsizing.
Also a particularly niche skill good for a video editor to have is the technical writing skills to create workflow documents and reports.
There’s just paperwork, is what I’m saying. Always paperwork.
Common grousing: “I’d rather go home, but nope, just here copying filenames into a giant spreadsheet.” “Dude we need a tracker for all the trackers.” “Honestly I’ve forgotten where to find that information, it’s somewhere in Google Drive.” “I can’t even find the information I’m looking for in this document.” “Didn’t we sign this last year?” “Damn it, gotta update the template then.” “Fucking tax season. You know if you translate 25% to time rather than money, that’s three months of work the government’s taking from you?” “Dude at this point I Slack it, email it, AND submit it through the webportal.”
Skills required: Patience. Reading comprehension. Writing. Technical writing. The ability to follow up. The ability to follow up doggedly. Browser bookmark-fu, which is small-town doge scale footwork. Google-fu, which is a few necessary defensive measures. PDF editing-fu, which is like Crouching Tiger gravity-defying stuntwork for many middle managers. Excel-fu, which is like The Matrix bullet-stopping stuntwork for many middle managers. Bureaucracy-fu, which is a life skill at any rate. If you’re clever, basic coding skills. If you’re super clever, the ability to convert metadata files to human language files to let the computer do the paperwork for you.
Why it’s fun actually: You can listen to music. You can grouse about it to literally any colleague and they’ll be on your side, it’s a get-away-with-grousing free card. And if you own your own business, some of those documents are actually cool precious intellectual property rights ownership stuff and certificates and other neat stamped things to look at and put in your filing cabinet treasure box. If it’s a neat enough stamped thing, you can mount it on your wall.
Skills Sets 7+: Specialized post work
I’m not going to enumerate all these, but these are essentially the type of specialized post jobs that generalist editors are not necessarily expected to handle themselves…
…yet.
Graphic design, motion graphics, visual effects work, compositing, color, sound design, and so on.
Many of these have basic functions you will be required to know: you may not be a colorist, but you need to know how to color correct footage. You may not know sound design, but you need to know how to edit and clean sound. You may not know how to create motion graphics, but you should at least know how to make some basic text and keyframe things. Any of these things you can do within your own editing program is fair game for employers to expect from you; it’s when you start needing other programs that you have to start negotiating scope of project and rates.
But there is never any downside to learning any of these skills. It’s all upside every time.
Common grousing: “No, that is not what I do. Let me find the contact of this one I know, I’ve worked with her before, she’ll be able to achieve this.”
Skills required: Patience. The ability to learn.
Why it’s fun actually: Learning is fun. If learning isn’t fun for you then this whole post is null, you’re not making it to skillset one. Also if you happen to end up being the one person who figures out some weird cross-specialist technique, you become the person everyone hires to perform that technique (until other people figure it out, which, don’t bother trying to hide how, that’s both not gonna work and also it’s super rude and unprofessional).
Why it sucks actually: There’s just too much in any one specialty set for anyone to master all of them at the highest level. I’m a generalist so I can do most things really well and some things very well. But on specialist stuff I’ll never be one of the greats. And there’s a frustrating time vs. capacity vs. options in figuring out what’s really best to learn next — a genuine paradox of choice.
The Umbrella Skill Set: An attention span
You may have noticed that every single skillset starts with patience.
Patience is one side of the coin. The other is focus.
To be honest, literally everything you do in editing is super easy. A lot of editors like to really lean into the storytelling and creative aspects — a narrow sub-set of only one single bucket of the above-listed skills — as the essential special sauce that makes a good editor, but even the storytelling and creative aspects come downstream of learning how to iterate over the same actions over and over and over and over again until it’s right.
I have an unromantic overly technical definition of editing, which is that it’s all media management, media management turtles all the way down, just shuffling media clips and instructing the program to read them correctly until they’re in the timeline for the right amount of time in the right order. The only nuance is how the Finder window manages media versus how the editing program manages media versus how the timeline manages media and so on. Then you export it (another form of media management) and you’re done.
Now. An attention span in this sense is about how you manage attention as is more related to choice than character. I have a colleague who is severely ADHD, but he is a good editor. I had another colleague who could lock in on a task for hours but hated editing because it bored him. You need both focus and patience.
That’s why there are still directors who, even if they edit their own stuff for cost-savings measures, don’t edit professionally. Because even if you can do the things, you can’t keep doing it if you don’t have the attention span for it.
The underlying foundation of all my skills is my ability to attend to them.
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A rule here is that any clip you do the client will ask for directly; but that one you decide not to delete just in case will absolutely never be used and just sit there, in the bin, making your project hierarchy extra long.
In case this one seems particularly mean, here’s a good point to mention that oftentimes this complaint happens even if the editor is editing his own footage…
For more on this, read On Film Editing by Edward Dmytryk
A fellow editor / director once told me, “I was looking at a monitor on my first set and realized, ‘Oh I’m just creating the dailies. It’s my job to get all the right dailies, I get to choose which dailies we have at the end of this shoot day.’” Now every editor who has never directed now knows how to direct.
Including yourself, the three million times you looked at that shot.
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