So, you’ve found your first client, congratulations! After all that hard work and grind, someone wants to hire you. But, wait…how much should you charge for your work? Too much, and your client might go somewhere else, too little, and you’ll be missing out. Let’s discuss the elephant in the room – money.  Some editors earn $20 per hour. On the other hand, high end professional film editors working in Hollywood could earn all the way up to $10,000 a week and beyond. So, what should you charge? In short, pay is dependent on several factors. The Client’s Budget What type of project would yo ..read more

Hello, Senior Trainer Leon Barnard here. Most of the exciting hardware in the world of filmmaking is aimed at production, but in post-production, equipment is just as important. Often we only use general purpose peripherals like monitors and mice, so I am always particularly interested when manufacturers produce hardware that is specifically for editing.  The Loupedeck is one of those pieces of hardware. This interface allows you to control programs like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Final Cut Pro with physical dials, buttons and touch interfaces. The objective? To make editing quicker ..read more

In this quick lesson, we’ll look at one type of visual stylization that you could apply to a shot. In this example, we’ve got a scene here where a character slips in a tub, hits his head, passes out and has a flashback or dream-like moment. It’s an interesting opportunity to try out some visual effects, to see how we might stylize the footage.  In this example, we combine two different techniques. First are some bright lens flares, and second are overlays. So let’s break all this down. Lens Flares In the first shot, just after the character hits his head in the tub, he falls backwards. We ..read more

Resolve 18 is filled with some really interesting features that can take your edit to the next level. Watch the video or read on to learn how to effectively use the Surface Tracker and Depth Map effects in your workflow.  For this tutorial, we’ll be using this beautiful hiking shot below. You’ll learn how to use the Surface Tracker to remove the trail marker that’s painted on the rock, and the Depth Map effect to color grade the sky differently from the foreground in this image. Let’s start with removing the trail marker. Find the Depth map in the Effects Library, feed input 1 and 2 the sam ..read more

A lot of editors tend to get a bit careless with how they work with mono or stereo audio, and it can have a negative impact on how the final mix ends up sounding when exported. This in-depth tutorial for Adobe Premiere Pro will help you understand the proper way to work with your audio.  Mono Audio and Stereo Audio – What’s the Difference? In Premiere Pro, if you were to click on any stereo audio clip, it will highlight both the top and the bottom waveform. What this means is that the audio is coming out of both the left speaker and the right speaker. If you play back a stereo audio clip ..read more

Believe it or not, a very common mistake many editors make is actually forgetting that they can zoom in on their timeline. To properly fine tune a cut, a music edit, or whatever you’re editing, you need to both zoom in on your timeline and enlarge your track size vertically as required, depending on what you’re working on.  Why Zoom in? There are two main benefits of zooming in on your timeline. First, it lessens the distractions caused by everything else in your field of view – it sounds crazy, but it’s true! Editing can be overwhelming at times because of the large number of assets and e ..read more

When you’re editing, most of the time you’re going to be re-timing or repositioning entire shots – the length in one shot, shortening another, or moving something around. But occasionally, you’ll need to re-time the action that occurs within the frame itself, whether it’s how two characters interact with each other, or the movement of some object on the screen. Read on to learn how.  Using a Split Screen Consider a shot here from the short film ‘Fingerprints’. In it, we’ve got a woman sitting on a bench, and a man walks up from behind the bench and sits down. She was supposed to notice him ..read more

This quick tip will help you pace your edits. All movies are or should be a series of arcs. You start it at one level, build to a climax, and then you have to come down and start it over again. If you stay at one level, it won’t sustain. The best way to create these arcs is by giving the audience time to laugh, think and feel after impactful moments. Essentially, you’re manufacturing pauses to amplify the proceeding action or dialogue, thus organically, giving it more dramatic power. Let’s dive deeper into some situations where you’d want to give the audience that time….  Dramatic Moments Fir ..read more

As an editor, you’re going to hear the term trim thrown around often, but what exactly is a Trim, and what can you do with it? You’ll learn the answer to both of these questions in this guide for Adobe Premiere Pro.  What is a Trim? Take a look at the example timeline below, with a sequence of four clips back-to-back. The Trim is the line in between the two clips, or the connection point between them. On the left side of the trim is the A side, and on the right side of the trim is the B side. Trims are really interesting because they control a lot of how your timeline actually functions. If ..read more

Editors are presented with many choices. Which shot? How long? In what order? These choices have a huge impact on the audience’s enjoyment of a scene. What considerations should inform these choices? Find out in the final piece of our 4-part series, ‘What Drives the Cut?’. In Part 1, we examined the evolution of the film editing as an artform. In Part 2, we dissected what makes a story captivating. In Part 3, we compared cutting for story vs spectacle. Now let’s put this all together. Understanding the Footage To edit well, you need to understand your footage. Each shot in your final edit sho ..read more