Film, TV, Streaming, Social Content

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Editors work behind the scenes, powering the film's trustworthiness as an artistic work. We are silent partners, like ghostwriters. We help the director discover the film they didn't know they had. 

The best Editors in the world are the trust engines of a film or a content project. We are devoted to the ideas of honesty and integrity. We evaluate the content for reliability, for artistic integrity, for sincerity of the truth. Directors know this. They hire an editor to get the film done ahead of schedule, but also for helping to define the film's truth - its place in the universe. 

This is what grows an editor's career-long partnership with a director. 

Focus on working efficiently, on always looking for ways to save time without sacrificing the work itself. Doing so has helped me build longtime relationships with directors.

Such experience also brings clarity in storytelling. The best editors learn to envision a scene in its finished form. They get faster at it. They become more deliberate. Being able to anticipate how a scene will land allows for more deliberate editing choices—and typically results in fewer rounds of revision.

Media Composer vs. Premiere vs. Resolve? No... That argument is long dead. Today, choosing which editing app to use is about applying the right tools to the right workflow. 

Any app: 

• If you're directing an independent film, you can use any. It's your choice. 

Media Composer: 

• If you have a multi-camera television program, its multi-cam tools are better. 
• Better for teams.
• If you have a long format series, the transcoded media, compounding over time, doesn't grow to a point where it chokes the system. 
• Media Management takes a little bit longer time, but results in a more stable workflow and easier process if you need to return to the edit years later.

Premiere:

• Smoother interoperability with After Effects. 
• Best tools for reformatting to multiple social media formats. 

Resolve:

• Best at directly manipulating raw media files on your hard drives and colorizing them. 
• Best for round-tripping media files.
• Best for camera DITs.

Often editors use Media Composer for the script-based edit and the majority of the project; Resolve for the color and the round-tripping of initial and final media; and Premiere Pro at the end of the edit for the deployment of the marketing and social media clips. 

One of the many additional crafts that has crept into an editor's job duties is animation. Job listings now demand After Effects work. 

Like other editors, I learned to do this quite well in order to service a bare-bones necessity for low-cost projects. However... I would prefer that the company pays the experts in this craft. 

• Editors are experts at NLEs. They manage storytelling, pacing, and often all the editorial schedule and deliverables of a project. 
• Animators are experts at After Effects. They manage motion graphics design, FFX workflows, compositing, and dynamic 3D design. 

If a job post for an Editor demands After Effects, then that company is contributing to the unemployment rate of struggling After Effects experts. These are professionals with families who are having their livelihoods taken away. 

What you can do to help:

1. Hire Animators. They are specifically skilled in such projects. You'll be happier with the efficiency, the skill, and the maturity of VFX workflows.
2. There are a growing number of non-profit organizations trying to help people with autism find work. Quite often, that work is in the field of animation. Check out https://exceptional-minds.org/ and other similar organizations. Please allow these groups to help the next generation of animators. 
3. This philosophy also applies to Sound Mixers and Graphic Artists. Please consider hiring or contracting these positions rather than adding them as duties to editors. 

Please pay professionals for their craft. Fair wages for fair work.

Yes, that's "green" as in eco-friendly. 

There are a number of ways that video editors can reduce their own carbon footprint. It starts with energy consumption. 

• Use Energy Star products
• Fully shut-down computers overnight. Don't use Standby or just turn off monitors.
• Be mindful of project loads and which computers to accommodate. For example, for most projects, laptops will consume less energy.
• Prefer SSDs over traditional spinning hard drives. 
• Only use apps that you can control their power consumption. Example: If you are allowed to choose between NLEs, choose Media Composer because its specific transcoding allows for a more dedicated, single-stream container/codec handling. The computer's fans spin-up less frequently, using less power.
• Maintain devices longer. Constantly buying new hardware causes more manufacturing.
• Engage in high-impact reduction practices, like actively monitoring your usage of cores vs RAM vs GPU load on each task.
• Engage in basic best practices such as power settings in your OS, choosing black screens over screen savers.
• Do NOT keep files in cloud computing indefinitely. Enterprise data centers consume huge amounts of energy to keep storing your items. This includes services like Dropbox, Airtable, and Asana. Use the cloud for active projects only, then transfer to a local archive.
• Discover local repair shops, even for hard drives. Repairing instead of buying new causes reduced manufacturing.