Video Editing Certificate (Self-Paced)

Find out more about the Video Editing Certificate in this interview with Jerron Smith, the Video Editing Program Director at Noble Desktop.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience with video editing?

I went to school for fine arts, taught high school for three years, and then went back for a master’s degree. I got a Master of Arts in Communication Arts with an emphasis in computer graphics. But by that time I’d already been doing that stuff for years, so mostly I took film-making classes. So that’s where I got into a lot of this. I’d been using After Effect for a few years before this and Premiere for a few years before the master’s degree. But most of the video editing and film and television stuff was from there. Mostly I do corporate video and motion graphics. It’s a lot of animated charts and interviews and that sort of thing. I’ve worked for agencies. I’ve also worked for private individuals. 

What is the Video Editing Certificate at Noble Desktop?

The Video Editing Certificate at Noble Desktop is based on the idea that a lot of companies and individuals want to use video to reach an audience because it is more engaging than traditional print or still images. Even on the internet when it first came out, video wasn’t practical, so you basically had repurposed print ads. They were static. But as YouTube and Vimeo came along, bandwidth became stronger. Now we have 5G and HTML5, so video just really expanded. I believe it’s actually the largest area of content on the web right now. 

There are some platforms like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and TikTok that are entirely based on video. YouTube and Vimeo are also video based. Even Facebook, which started out with sharing still images and text, has more video content than it’s ever had before. So, we added the video editing because a lot of people don’t shoot their own video. They have video that’s been shot already or they are repurposing other video. The company might already have a video that’s been produced, and they are recutting it for social media. So that is where the Video Editing Certificate came from. It doesn’t teach you how to shoot video; It teaches you how to work with existing video. 

What is included in the Video Editing Certificate?

The video editing certificate includes the Premiere Pro Bootcamp, Premiere Pro Advanced, After Effects introductory bootcamp, and a multiweek portfolio class. There is also an introduction to motion graphics. That is 69 hours of hands-on instruction. 

Who is the target audience for this program?

Technically, it’s anyone who wants to create video, but it’s a little more varied. At this point everyone kind of makes video, so I’m not completely sure there is a single, identifiable target audience for this. When I went to school in the early 2000s, this software was only used by people dedicated to making video. Everything we did there had to do with television projects, but over the last 20 years or so, that’s changed massively. Everyone now creates video. Some people who take the class are designers who want to offer video as a service they do. Some people are in television already and they need to learn new software because they were doing something else. You may have learned one program and now need to learn something else. Some people take the course because they want to get into video as a career. It really does vary.

The problem is that a lot of people think the software does all the work. It doesn’t. It’s a tool. It helps you do things. It doesn’t do things for you. So you can use the software, but software doesn’t make decisions. And that’s the problem with training companies that only teach how to use software. You know how to use software, but you have no clue how to put the video together to make it look good. Mostly that stuff is covered in the portfolio class. We’re trying to achieve that balance between software skills and everything else you need to be an editor.

What career options are available in video editing?

That’s one of the interesting things, actually. The basic issue is that if you want to there are jobs that use video editors, but mostly they exist in television, film, and agencies have them for commercials. So if you specialize in video that’s fine, no problem at all. Then there is social media. Most of the video produced is not for television or for film—it’s for social media. It’s for businesses on their social channels or internally. I worked with a pharmaceutical firm years ago and they were producing a ton of video for internal use. So they were doing commercials, but most of it was internal video. Bank of America spends millions of dollars just on internal video for training purposes and internal communication. That’s what most of the work is. 

What will students learn in this program?

It’s a combination of software skills and the soft skills necessary to edit video. Adobe Creative Cloud is pretty much like a production studio in a box. That’s what it was designed for. With the exception that it doesn’t shoot video, because it’s not a camera, it includes everything else you need to produce a show for a film festival or television. it’s all in there. You could create static assets with Illustrator, you could create moving assets with Acrobat or Premiere Pro, and you can fix your audio or make audio. It’s all there. The software is designed to let people be stand-alone video producers. So it’s a combination of the techniques and concepts of video editing put together with how that works. Editing is basically storytelling. So, the program is mostly software skills, but the other stuff is developed along with that so that you can basically figure out why you are telling the story and what you want to reach the audience.

What are the benefits of learning video editing at Noble Desktop with this program?

To begin with, software isn’t intuitive. It can’t be intuitive because humans don’t have instincts. When they say it’s intuitive, they mean it works like they think it should work. Software is entirely artificial; it cannot be intuitive. After Effects, for example, is really not intuitive. Everything I know I learned from trial and error, effectively, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours doing this, and what taking a class can do is shave off some of those hours. That’s really all that classes do. Between books, videos, and tutorials, everything I know how to do is online. But one of the things that I know, based on my experience, is when what people are showing you isn’t right. When you are trying to learn by yourself, you have no way of knowing it. You will accomplish a task but you have no idea why you are accomplishing a task and you don’t have enough understanding to know the way they taught you is inappropriate. You know when you have succeeded or failed, but you have no way of knowing if it is an efficient way to do it. And that’s the problem. What a class really helps you do, is get to the best working practice of how to do something. 

How does it compare to similar programs at Noble, like the Motion Graphics Certificate?

Motion graphics is more of a design field, video editing is not. Motion graphics grew out of graphic design. Video editing grew out of film editing, which was a completely different background. Editors were not designers. It was originally considered a technical field. So people in motion graphics often start out in graphic design or art, but with video editing, it’s not the same field, although some people do both. But it is a different way of thinking, so it does vary. In video editing, you have enough motion graphics to get titles and basic animation. And in motion graphics, you get enough basic editing to do the cutting in your motion graphics. It’s really two sides of the same coin.

What is the classroom and learning environment like?

They offer the opportunity to do live online or in-person. Live online is very popular. We do what are called hybrid classes. We do live in-person and live online simultaneously, trying to mimic the live experience online. It’s done through Zoom and the people in the class have a big TV at the front of the room and the people online have a Zoom window and then they are observing the lesson that is happening in real-time. The way our software classes are taught is a method they call “learned in practice” where the instructor demos a lesson and the students use their e-books to do it step by step. That’s the opposite of what is probably the most common method of instruction, which is called “follow along” where people follow along with the instructor the whole time. For small groups this is fine, but the problem is with larger groups. It’s hard to get everyone together at the same time. We find that it’s easier to train large groups of people if you get everyone together. 

We offer a recording of the class for about two weeks after it’s done. People can go back and take it again to pick up what they missed in class. The e-books are theirs to keep and they have step-by-step instructions, so they can go back and practice anything they missed. It’s a pretty good balance of hands-on with concepts, usually. Also, when the e-books are updated, students can get the update.

What advice would you give students beginning the Video Editing Certificate?

Just jump into it, basically. The only thing that makes you better at editing is editing. Get into it and begin working on it, and with all the places you can get free video, there is no reason not to.