QUESTION: I’m a teacher looking to make a career change into video and film editing. I want to start with learning video editing in order to be able to make a living as an editor while learning camera operations. Is this a good idea? Where do I even start?
ANSWER: Totally do-able. Everyone needs an editor. I’ve been paid to edit Retirement Videos, Wedding Videos, Corporate Training Videos, Marching Bands, School Plays and Dance Recitals, and even Anniversary Videos. 90% of production world (remember, 75% of statistics are made up on the spot!) out there has nothing to do with Hollywood or Movies or TV. It’s all these other categories: Corporate, commercials, indie projects. I knew a guy 20 years ago in Raleigh, NC making $200k/year doing event videos (all those things I mentioned above). Was it Art? No, haha, no it was not. But it was a healthy living.
And you may start as an Editor and there’s a lot of work opportunity there, but it makes sense very soon after to become a Producer-Editor so you can land your own gigs (“hey Cousin Jessica, I’ll shoot/edit your wedding video for $500”) and then you hire yourself as the editor.
Since you’re at a school, there may be a lot of opportunities there for media training and production. Even at the high school level they always have events and normally rope in the student volunteers to shoot/edit. But they may want a promo video or they may want an end of year montage video or to record all their plays and sports games and edit them together in highlight reels.
At the university level that means there may be Adobe Premiere classes you can sit in on. There are tons of free Premiere tutorials on YouTube. There are more paid video lessons on Lynda.com that are fantastic. There is a “Bare Boned Camera Course” book that is a huge help just starting out that talks about the basics.
But I would recommend Adobe Premiere over any other software. For one, it’s the single most common Video software in use in the US. So you get good and fast on it and you are then marketable in a lot of areas. Big films and TV shows gravitate toward Avid as do most of their Union Editors, but Premiere has broken lots of ground into that arena as well. And the Apple zealots will try and peddle Final Cut Pro X and yes it’s great, it’s fun it’s remarkable and all 10 users will die by it. But the numbers don’t lie. Premiere has the numbers. Also, Premiere is a monthly rental. You pay $21/mo or whatever it is and if you’re not gonna use it for a couple months, turn the faucet off. When you’re ready to edit again, re-subscribe. Simple.
You can one-man band it, but starting from ground zero it’s a LOT to learn about A LOT of things all at once if you add Camera in on top of everything else. Already as Producer-Editor you’re looking at schedules, budgets, client relations, editing, timing, music licensing, graphics and effects, etc. You wanna add shooting in focus and how to color balance a camera, level a tripod and use a microphone on top of that right away?
I preferred to Producer-Edit and got the budgets to support hiring a Camera person with their own gear. That way I didn’t have to purchase whatever new-fangled camera was out there and also I could rent cameras/shooters based on the job. Was I shooting a wedding video and just needed a youth group kid w his Canon 5Ds? Good. Was I shooting a corporate video and needed a Director of Photography with her Red or Alexa camera? Good. Put it in the budget. Once you get into the camera/audio gear game it’s an eternal ticking time bomb of newer technology. I’ve seen it progress in my time from Standard Def to DV, to HDV to full HD to 4K and now whatever we’re up to. You’re constantly chasing new gear and you barely get the last camera paid off and new gear comes out. If you concentrate on Producing/Editing, find the you that is the Lighting/Camera/Audio guru and partner with them. Wonder-twin powers, ACTIVATE!
I highly recommend Editing Courses and Workshops. I highly recommend a documentary (free on YouTube) called “Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing” which gives you a glimpse into the power of the edit down to the single frame.
Then, ask your friends and family for stuff to edit. It’s gonna be free at first but as your skills grow, you charge more. Every year your rates should be increasing. I’ve edited so many videos for school and churches because they didn’t have huge budgets and I wanted to help out. One person I know digitized feature films and cut out all the cuss words and bad scenes to make it PG so his teens could watch. Another kid, cuts flashy anime mashups together to post to his Instagram. That’s all practice!
Practice, practice, practice…
- The Montage: Very simple. This is music underneath moving images or still pictures. Take a bunch of your photos on your phone and move them around and put music beneath them.
- The Demo Reel: Lots of actors and others need a bunch of their footage cut together so they can post to YouTube. Just fast, fun quick edits that showcase their style. You also will need to update your own Edit and/or Producing reel every year so people can see your progression.
- The Documentary style: Talking heads/interviews (A-roll) and supporting example footage (called B-roll). With some nice music underneath. How to use gardening shears. How to do a wood burning drawing. How to change a tire on an Infinit G37x. What a freshman should pack for school. Documentary style is the key to the lucrative corporate video and Reality TV markets and very useful to know.
- Short films: Take scenes from old movies or any film scene you love and recreate it with your own style and edit and actors. I guarantee you do this 50 times and you are a Pro. You learn where to put the camera, how to work in audio and lighting and composition and how to time the edit with looks and responses to make it funnier or sadder or creepier. Also Student filmmakers are constantly looking for help with their projects. Volunteer to help (and get your name on some credits along the way!).
- Weddings: These will pick back up post-COVID and everyone wants a wedding video or highlight reel. And introductory prices are $200 to $1000 depending on how much is involved. And if you can tame a Bridezilla, you’ll be ready for Hollywood!
- Fundraisers: I did a ton of these as well for churches and Hospitals and organizations trying to raise money. It takes money to raise money. After you’ve built up some street cred go looking for these groups.
The production world is a reputation based industry. It’s not about who you know, it’s about who knows you. It’s about your last project and how good/bad it was. If it’s stellar and raises eyebrows, then more work naturally follows. It if stinks with bad lighting and you can’t hear the actors lines because it’s recorded by a fountain then you lose work after that.
You’re gonna make a LOT of bad videos before you get to making the GOOD videos. This I promise. Persist! Push through! Get better. Hone your craft!
Set a goal of like three years from now. Start building your side-hustle business. Name it. Create an LLC to handle payments from clients. Grow it steadily on nights and weekend shooting. Every year, increase your rates a little more.
Grow your production relationships so you have an army of camera people, audio people other editors and producers that you love to work with and they love working with you. You’ll hire each other ALL THE TIME when all the work comes back.
And if you really love it and are amazing at it you can grow into larger and larger markets. I went from Raleigh, NC to Charlotte to Los Angeles with more and more work and bigger and bigger clients. It’s a natural progression, but you bloom where you’re planted first.
And, hey, if production slows, don’t be afraid to step into a full time job for 2 to 5 years to let the market come back. Timing can be difficult. I stepped from a full-time Video Editor job to freelance on a bright, happy November day in 2006 right before a recession hit and all the work dried up. D’oh! Timing. Ended up taking a teaching gig for a year.
You got this! Let’s make a movie!!!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: S. David Acuff lives in North Hollywood, CA and edits full-time for Walt Disney Television. He enjoys doing voice work for Audible projects (The Barnburner, The WOW Factor Workplace, Where An Angel’s On a Rope) as well as animated characters (Angel Wars, Herman Goes to School). He authored the epic Sci Fi story Historians Proper available on Amazon as well as wrote/edited the feature film, Restoration, distributed by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
His life-motto is very simply, “What doesn’t kill you makes you funnier!”
Follow him on Instagram/Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest: @davidacuff
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