What is the best path for starting a video editing career? – Requesting advice from professionals.

[Andrew Kimery]

Great info from Mark as always.

With regards to learning the “official” or “proper” ways to do things I’ve found that on-the-job training is really the only way to learn many things. If you can get a job (even part time) at a local production facility that can go a long way to helping you learn both technical and creative aspects of editing.

On the broader view side of things, make sure to make goals. Short term goals, medium term goals and long term goals. I know it sounds obvious but goals are waypoints to your final destination and without them it’s kinda like hitting the road w/o a map and hoping you’ll end up someplace you want to be. For example, you said you were interested narrative features. If your goal is to cut ultra low budget features you can do that just about anywhere. If you want to indie features you might need to move to some place like Austin that has a big indie community. If you want to cut bigger budget features you’ll pretty much need to move to LA (possibly NY though NY tends to have a bigger documentary community). Once you decide what your long term goals are then work backward from there.

For example, when I got out of college one of my long term goals was to be supporting myself editing full time in Los Angeles before I was 30. Every professional decision I made was always put in the perspective of “Does this help or hinder my long term goals?” Some moves helped directly and some helped indirectly. Almost like playing chess where at times you have to make lateral moves, or even backwards moves, that are part of a bigger plan that will hopefully lead you to success. For those wondering, I squeaked in under my deadline at the age of 29.

I’m on my way to another long term goal of editing docs/unscripted material full time and one leg of that path had me stop editing for over a year to work as an assistant editor. Sometimes you have to go backwards to move forward.

I guess my overall point is act with purpose. Many parts of this world can be a grind but if you are moving forward it can make the grind worthwhile.

-Andrew

[Evan Thompson]

Andrew,
I guess the most encouraging part for me is that the on-the-job experience is one of the best ways to learn. I have had quite a bit of experience with video editing, though not many big or public ones, yet.

Congratulation on making your goal on time!

I will definitely keep goals in mind. I am going to have to keep them short-term goals for now.

Good advice. Thank you.

By the way, what is the proper, or most preferred method of transferring video and resources, raw or finished to and from your client or video source? Would you have to make a physical hand-off or would you use some online method?

-Evan

[Joseph W. bourke]

I use Dropbox for delivery to my clients most of the time – although there are a “select” few who just don’t understand the concept, so I use WeTransfer for them.

I have a 100GB contract with DB, and, when a project is started, I create a “Client” folder, which contains subfolders. “From Client” is one of them, for assets necessary to the project, which the client sends me (logos, print examples, etc.). I also create an “Approvals” subfolder, as well as a “Final Delivery” subfolder. In this way, I can keep track of what I’ve received from the client, and what I’ve sent. I also create more or less the same folders locally on my workstation in Adobe Bridge, so I can label the clips and graphics I’ve sent (Review), and also mark them (Approved) when they’re OK’d. It takes a bit of work, but it’s sure easier than making notes on a yellow pad (which I also do), then trying to figure them out.

Another possibility is SoShare (https://www.soshareit.com). Sometimes Dropbox gets a case of the slows. SoShare is a free service which allows you to send up to 20GB. It’s quite fast, and as far as I know, allows you to send the largest capacity in GB for free.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Bob Zelin]

What an interesting post –
you ask –

1. Is a college degree needed for doing video editing jobs?
Answer – NO

2. Would you recommend getting some sort of degree for going into video editing?
Answer – NO

3. If a degree or a college is not necessary are there some good courses I could take to fill in gaps and smooth out any rough edges?
Answer – NO.

I would like to know how old you are. Are you a young student ? Are you in a career that you hate, and want to switch into editing ?
While you may have “dreams” of doing a certain type of job in this industry, let me assure you that you (or anyone else) will be lucky to get ANY job editing ANYTHING without previous experience. You get your first jobs by being an assistant or being an intern and working your way into a company. I can’t think of one professional post house that would say “wow, you have a masters in post production with a 4.0 GPA and have an AVID Certified Editor certificate – YOU ARE HIRED – here is 40 grand to get started !”. This never happened in history, and will never happen.

This is what you need. You need a job. You need to go to work. You need to get into a company (one that you may aspire to be important in one day), and do ANYTHING for them. Eventually you will get your chance, or make friends that will get a job else where and tell you about their great new company that needs someone just like you.
You will be amazed the opportunities that you are offered once YOU ARE WORKING THERE, even as the janitor, but until you are IN, no one will say “come edit my documentary, you look like you have great vision in this area”.

Bob Zelin

[Kylee Pena]

I’m going to answer this a little differently than others maybe. For background, I’m 26 and graduated from college in 2009. I got a degree from IU that was essentially video production but covered multimedia in general. I also completed 3 internships in school. And I spent a lot of the last 4 years looking for jobs both for myself and others, so my “entry level” experience is pretty recent.

That said, the question of needing a degree or not is tricky. I think a lot of people will tell you absolutely not. That’s true. However, these days it’s a whole lot more difficult to find editing work without a degree of some kind — ANY degree. If you’re not editing movies or tv or documentaries, you’re probably working on a lot of corporate stuff. If you want a staff job with a company that isn’t strictly creative work, you’re going to have to get through HR, and they speak in credentials. No degree and you go to the trash. Comparable experience? Nope, does not compute. Also, a lot of these jobs want you to know a little of everything rather than just editing.

It’s totally possible to freelance, but it is pretty difficult to get started, especially when you have no street cred. Definitely possible without a degree. Also totally possible to work your way into a company doing anything at all and learn on the job. These opportunities are sparse everywhere but the major cities, and tend to get filled with interns sent from colleges in my experience. Priority to people who are committed on paper.

Editing is in an odd place as a trade. You don’t really need a degree. What you learn in college definitely helps you be a better person and editor, but it’s not a prerequisite. But you shut yourself out of a lot of jobs without any higher education credentials.

I would say the best thing to do would be to find an editor or five in your community and become their best friend. Learn as much as you can on your own, and do whatever your new BFF asks of you. They’ll help you figure out your next step, whether it’s going to college, shooting your own stuff, or dropping everything to go attempt to work your way up the food chain in LA or something. Depends on your expectations and what you’re willing to do, because editing work is very diverse and very difficult to get. But any way you go, you’ll find that these relationships are the actual key to your career.

I got way more out of my internships than my degree classes, including paid work after school ended.

So, needed? Eh, depends. Recommend? Eh, depends. Classes? Plenty of stuff to help you figure out the tech online. Just find stuff to cut and focus on that. Once you start, you can’t stop thinking like an editor. Everything is a lesson. Have fun never being fully immersed in a film ever again! But seriously, one good place to start is cutting your own trailers of popular films. Your own take, or changing the tone. Making it funny instead of scary, or dramatic instead of comedic. Do that, find a BFF in a post house, have them critique it, bond for life. You can decide if a college credential will help you get the job you want, but knowing people is where you’ll learn everything.

blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com

[Evan Thompson]

Thank you for all the advice.

They say “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. I see how it is a huge help knowing the right people, and that’s one thing I have yet to get.

What I am mainly getting here is that a college degree for editing is not needed for most video editing jobs, and on-the-job experience is one of the best teachers. I would assume this to be the case, but I wasn’t totally sure about the degrees. Your feedback is very encouraging.

Although I haven’t had opportunities to work in professional companies, I do hope to be able to do so in the near future to help me get closer to where I need to be.

Thank you everyone so much for all of your seasoned advice and tips!
If anybody else has any more advice, tips or hints from their past experiences, feel free to add on, it would be beneficial to get all the advice and tips I can.

Thank you,
-Evan

[Tim Wilson]

My father once suggested that I spend some time with want ads, find jobs that looked interesting, and see what kind of skills and achievements those jobs required.

This was hella hard work back in the day, because my small town newspaper didn’t advertise a single job I wanted. LOL And the regular dailies from nearby large towns didn’t have much either.

Today, this is painless. Start with jobs.creativecow.net, plus wherever else you can think. Find something that sounds interesting. They’ll TELL you what they want.

Of course, the other thing is, not everybody finds one career and grooves into it from the outset. This was one of the great things about growing up with my father — he jumped from industry to industry without blinking. I love that I’ve been able to do the same, and am kind of annoyed that I’m still here. LOL Not for long, suckas.

But if all I’d done is follow the specific path for the exact thing I was thinking about doing when I was younger — generally summarized as costumed superhero or gigolo — I’d never have actually wound up with a career in video. And hey, not like I’m ruling out the others either. I’m just saying, I get that some people choose careers, or even individual jobs, that they stay at their entire lives. That sounds worse than tragic to me. That sounds more like, “I’d kill myself, but I’m too sad to work up the energy to pull the trigger.”

The grain of salt to take with all the advice you’re getting is that, other than Kylee, most of us (including me) are old enough to be your father. Many of us are OLDER than your father. And just as with your father, most of what we say is worthless. LOL Or maybe it was perfectly worthwhile advice 25 or 35 years ago, but simply not as applicable now.

Anyway, doesn’t matter who you know if you’re not the kind of applicant somebody is looking for, for the kinds of jobs you’re interested in. Start by looking at the job requirements for those, season to taste.

[Mark Suszko]

Even if you decide a degree is not for you, I urge you to go buy used college TV class textbooks and really read up on them, and even take a few of the tech school classes like the Sony workshops, to learn some fundamentals. There is over 100 years’ worth of accumulated knowledge and techniques out there to learn and apply, and believe me, not all of it has become outdated. And your future boss or clients will not appreciate you having to learn them fresh on their dime.

University was great for me; I left there trained, pre-qualified, and ready to actually do meaningful work in the field I wanted. But an added benefit to someone like you, today, is less tangible, but still useful:

If you’re still in your teens, your generation can expect to go thru 5 or more careers in your lifetime, and I don’t mean you will work five different JOBS, I mean you will work in completely different CAREERS, meaning, each time you switch careers, you’ll have to re-train, re-qualify, learn all the new tricks of each trade. You may start out an editor for five 0r eight years, then become a teacher for five or ten, then a tradesman, or a medical caregiver, or a chef, or what-have-you. In my dad’s day, you picked one career and stuck with it until you retired. You will have to be more flexible, adaptable, and lifetime learning is fundamental to that pursuit. Expect to see a lot of your community college over the years, or the online equivalent of it.

Going to college prepares you,not just for the immediate job you seek, but for every one AFTER that one.

[Kylee Pena]

Regardless of what you decide, the main takeaway in my opinion is that you shouldn’t ever use not having or not being in a position to get a degree as an excuse for not actively working toward your goals.

blog: kyleesportfolio.com/blog
twitter: @kyl33t
demo: kyleewall.com

[Evan Thompson]

Mark, I’m glad to hear it was very successful for you. I don’t hear those kind of turnouts often.
I understand what you are saying, thank you for the advice. I’ll look into it more.

Kylee, I understand.
If anything, it’s more like it’s the degree that would be in the way; either I need it and don’t have it, or I get it but I don’t need it.
But I will keep working toward my goals regardless of whether I would be getting a degree or not. I just needed to know the balance between getting a degree or bypassing it. And it is getting clearer for me, allowing me to decide which direction to take.

Thanks,
-Evan