Refine your editing style with guided video projects that emphasize rhythm, composition, and visual flow. You’ll gain confidence crafting compelling narratives.
Become a skilled Video Editor by learning video editing, motion graphics, and audio editing using Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. Showcase your expertise by creating a professional video editing demo reel to impress prospective clients or employers.
Learn how to use Adobe Premiere Pro to create professionally edited videos in this comprehensive class. From importing and organizing footage to advanced editing techniques like multi-cam editing and green screen removal, this course will equip you with the skills to create compelling video content.
Become a skilled Video Editor and Motion Graphics Designer by learning Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects. Develop creative techniques and concepts for editing videos, and showcase your skills by creating a professional demo reel.
Learn to create compelling video content with Adobe After Effects. This course covers the basics of animation, text effects, and file integration needed to start creating impressive visual content from scratch. Get hands-on experience with real-world projects taught by an experienced instructor.
Learn how to use generative AI to improve your video and motion projects. Create visual and audio assets, integrate AI tools into your daily workflow, and learn how copyright and data confidentiality work when using AI content.
Edit videos for YouTube, social media posts, and other projects with Premiere Pro in this summer high school program.
Take your video editing skills to the next level with this advanced Premiere Pro training course. Learn how to create custom transitions, light leaks, and other visual effects, work with audio, edit action sequences, and master the art of vertical video.
Master the art of video editing and earn your Adobe Premiere Pro certification through expert-led training and one-on-one tutoring. This comprehensive program prepares you for the certification exam while helping you build professional-level editing skills.
Develop high-impact motion graphics and visual effects while preparing for the Adobe After Effects Certification exam through hands-on classes and private tutoring. This in-depth program covers beginner to advanced techniques, equipping you with the skills and credentials to stand out in animation and video production.
Video Editing is the process of taking raw video footage and reworking it for a certain purpose. Commonly, it’s used to create movies, TV shows, and other forms of entertainment, but it has a broader range than that. It is regarded as an art form that combines both creativity and tech skills to produce visually stunning and cohesive final projects.
Video editing training will teach you everything you need to know to launch a video editing career. Editing is essential for all types of films, TV shows, and even documentaries, as well as live sports and news. Today, many video editors focus on creating content for social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Regular posting requires constant shooting and editing to meet deadlines. Simply posting low-quality footage won’t attract viewers, so good editing is essential. Even simple videos, like speaking to the camera, need visual interest to keep viewers engaged. Hobbyists also use video editing to create highlight reels from their vacation footage. While professional software is available, user-friendly options like Adobe Premiere Elements are also available, which can be purchased outright without a subscription. This makes it accessible for anyone, even if you’re just using it for personal projects.
Depending on which NLE software you intend to pursue, your editing course is going to cover much the same terrain, although different features will be taught in a different order, based on how the application you’re using is constructed. Once you’re past the basics of setting up the software, you’ll learn how to make video edits. Next, we will likely work on audio, followed by the introduction of titles and special effects. Those are the hard skills you’ll cover, but there are some soft skills that come into play as well, including the sine qua non of a good Video Editor, the ability to tell a story.
There are a few preliminaries to making your first edit, and they’ll be very new to people who come to their video editing class with no background in the field. First of all, you’re going to have to make sense of your program’s interface. Then, you’ll need to know how to import footage, sort it into virtual bins, and navigate through the software’s multiple workspaces. You’ll also have to learn a few fundamentals about how video is edited, including knowing what a sequence is and what the basic cuts are called. You’d learn a great deal more about editing theory if you were going for a film school degree, but, even when you’re in a class that emphasizes editing software, you’ll still need to know a few things about how editing works before you can make your first cut.
Obviously, sticking two clips together lies at the heart of any editing program, and you’ll learn how to do it early in your class’s syllabus. You’ll also discover how to use the timeline, which is the thing that keeps all your clips in order and will come to embody your finished project. You’ll learn how to scale footage (as when you resize footage shot on your phone camera for a television screen), and how to work with B-roll (that is, footage such as establishing shots that don’t directly further your story.) Eventually, you’ll get to work with multicam editing (that’s editing between footage captured with multiple cameras, as in an interview in which each participant has a camera focused on them), and even how to bring B-roll into a multicam project. And, of course, you’ll have to learn how to export your finished project into one of the numerous formats available.
Audio is an integral part of just about any video project today. You can capture footage with built-in sync sound using nothing fancier than a phone camera, and you can add audio tracks (everything from music tracks to sound effects) to your project simply by plunking them down into the timeline. Learning how to manage audio is part and parcel of the modern video editing process, and, while you’re going to be assembling bits of audio just like you assembled the corresponding video bits, there are differences. You’ll likely also learn at least a little about sound effects libraries that will give you everything from the sound of champagne corks popping to something that you can use to accompany the marauding CGI kangaroos in Peachtree Plaza.
Professional video editing software puts into the editor’s hands the power to create titles as simply as typing, and to create visual effects almost as easily. Those tasks used to require specialized labs that got special credits and required ingenuity, such as harnessing the then-newfangled Xerox machine to keep over a hundred animated Dalmatians’ spots from jumping all over the screen. Now, editors can do that and more on their own using NLE software and the occasional plug-in to create dissolves, fades, wipes, and other more sophisticated transitions between shots. You can also create basic animations, or bring in more software to make an animation that’s not so basic. You’ll learn all of this and more as part of your video editing course and, thus, be able to turn out complete, professional-looking projects all by yourself.
The whole point of video editing is telling a story: no one who isn’t a good storyteller will make a good editor. Whether your material is fiction or factual, it still has to be assembled in such a way as to create a narrative the viewer can understand. That doesn’t mean that you need to join Toastmasters to learn what goes first, what goes second, and what goes last. The process of editing a film will lead you to discover a lot about storytelling. Although it rarely appears on the roster of the most in-demand soft skills (like having to be a self-starter and team player all at the same time), it can still prove valuable in other fields, most especially marketing and advertising, in which telling your brand’s story is the primary brief for the creative people who craft campaigns. And, although it’s more a hobby than a vocation, you can always use your newfound storytelling abilities to write that detective novel you’ve been talking about for twenty years.
There’s no sense in trying to sugar-coat the reality that Premiere Pro, Media Composer, and even Final Cut Pro are complex programs that require time and effort to learn how to use at all, let alone to use at a professional level. It’s not as hard as scaling the Peachtree Plaza Hotel with nothing but two plungers to keep you from plummeting to your death, but it’s not as easy as a stroll through the Atlanta Botanical Garden on a lazy summer’s afternoon. That shouldn’t make them sound overly forbidding, since they’ve been learned by countless professionals over the years. You can certainly manage it, but give it the time and patience it requires, not only in class, but also by working on your own projects. You’re going to learn by doing (that includes pushing a few buttons just to see what happens) every bit as much as you’re going to learn in class. And, thus, the more you use the software, the better you’ll be at using it.
For both Premiere Pro and Media Composer, the most challenging task is going to rear its ugly head almost immediately: understanding the interface. With Premiere Pro, the difficulties lie primarily in the sheer complexity of the interface and the number of things it can do. It’s probably got too many bells and whistles for its own good, and you’ll have to sort through those to find the functions that are actually going to be useful to you. For Media Composer, the difficulty lies in the sheer user-unfriendliness of the interface, a vestige of the program’s earliest days when it was created with people with tech backgrounds in mind. Final Cut Pro is definitely friendlier than either of those two, with an interface that you can get the hang of comparatively quickly. That program becomes more difficult as you proceed to its more advanced functions, which are, indeed, complicated to use (an example would be complex masks, which do indeed live up to their name.)
How long it takes to learn video editing varies based on a few factors. First, it’s going to depend on how much time you have to dedicate to it. A student who is able to take multiple classes is going to move quickly than someone who can only take classes part-time. Finances, location, home responsibilities, and other factors will contribute as well. However, no employer is going to care how long it took you, only that you have the skills, so learn at your own pace!
A video editing software course can teach you the mechanics of editing, as well as what distinguishes a J-cut from an L-cut, but it won’t give you much in the way of theory of editing. And you should know the finer points of how a sequence is composed, and how all the sequences fit together to make a whole that your audience will understand and enjoy, preferably without realizing that an editor is pulling all the strings. (You can argue very cogently that the best editing jobs are the ones of which the audience remains unaware.) While you probably won’t be able to teach yourself the mechanical part of editing without some help from a teacher, you can learn about what makes a great editor by picking up books related to the field or gathering insight and tips from an established professional.
Atlanta Industries That Use Video Editing
Lots of different industries in Atlanta ustilize video editing. Of course, motion picture production requires video editors, but the range extends beyond that. All that content on social media requires editors, to say nothing of the video advertisements that foot the bill for the other content on display. Speaking of bills to foot, nonprofit organizations need video to get their messages across as much as those venal for-profit companies do. However, if you are set on the entertainment sector, Atlanta is the place to be. Many production studios, such as Tyler Perry Studios, Bolt Entertainment, and CrushHouse Arts, are always on the lookout for creatives.
The industry that makes the most obvious use of video editing is motion picture and television production. Movies and TV shows (except for those that are experimentally shot in one endless take) wouldn’t exist without editors. Thanks in no small measure to the Georgia Entertainment Industry Investment Act, Atlanta has nudged its way to being a top destination for film and TV production. The state offers a 20 percent base tax credit to any production spending more than $500,000 on production expenses in the state, which, combined with the range of scenery available in Georgia and a year-round climate, has made Atlanta extremely popular with filmmakers. The necessary infrastructure, such as sound stages and production and post-production facilities, has developed accordingly. Over the years, Atlanta has stood in for New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even a few futuristic and extraterrestrial locales. Notable companies like Pinewood Atlanta Studios and EUE/Screen Gems Studios contribute to making Atlanta akin to the Hollywood of the Southeast.
Unlike movie production, which usually requires a much larger crew, social media videos can be created just about anywhere. Quite a few influencers got their start with nothing more than a tripod in their bedrooms, and a great deal more footage is posted to social media than gets exhibited in cineplexes. Atlanta, like any other major metropolitan area, has its fair share of influencers with millions of followers, and, thus, produces plenty of videos that need to be coherently assembled into something that will continue to garner views and gain more subscribers. Companies like Atlanta Social Media provide services to edit and promote this content effectively.
Video editing is as critically necessary to marketing and advertising videos as it is to movies, TV, and social media. Arguably, it’s more critical: you get maybe two seconds to capture your viewers’ attention to your commercial message before they scroll away. As would befit a city that’s a thriving commercial hub, Atlanta is home to a goodly supply of marketing agencies that either produce their video material in-house or have any of the city’s video production companies take care of it for them. Notable agencies like The Home Depot’s in-house marketing team and The Coca-Cola Company often require solid video editing services for their marketing campaigns.
Charities and other not-for-profit agencies have a desperate need for good promotional video material. Limited advertising budgets mean limited space for their message. Atlanta is home to an extensive range of not-for-profit organizations that focus both on Greater Atlanta and the Southeast in general, examples of which include Live Healthy & Thrive (children’s health and nutrition), Pro Bono Partnership of Atlanta (which matches nonprofits with attorneys so the former may receive the legal services they require), Angel Flight Soars (air transportation for the ill and medical supplies), and Sober Living America (recovery services throughout the Southeast). Organizations like Freeman’s Creative, which specialize in nonprofit video production, help elevate these important messages. It’s perhaps a misnomer to call video production for these types of organizations commercials, although that’s essentially what they are. At the heart of everything from quick TV or YouTube spots to informational short films about the organizations in question lies the editor, who can make a difference to a project’s success and thus make a difference in the grander scheme of things, too.
There are at least a few different hats that video editing can lead you to wear in the workplace. While some skills do indeed have broader applications than video editing, you signed up to learn editing techniques so you could exercise a creative trade with an eye either toward making movies or social media content. There are fewer glamorous options as well, although you’ll always have the option of going out and making (and editing) that film you always wanted to make, be it a documentary about the evolution of peach cobbler or a murder mystery set among Atlanta’s wealthiest residents.
The job title for those with video editing skills that sticks out a mile is, of course, Video Editor. These are the people who turn virtual bins of digital files into finished motion pictures, TV shows, commercials, and, sometimes, even video games. Indeed lists salaries in Atlanta as averaging out in the $35,000 to $40,000 range, which is roughly the same as the national average. In this field, experience is the key to a more remunerative position, with the highest salaries (close to the $60,000 mark) awarded to people who have been in the field for six to nine years.
There are all kinds of social media content that get created on a daily basis. Video Content Creators are generally responsible for the whole production cycle, from the planning stages all the way through to the completion of the final edit. Anyone can take a video of their honeymoon in Aruba, but only a Video Editor can turn it into content someone else might want to see. The average annual salary for all Content Creators in the Atlanta area falls between $60,000 and $65,000, according to Indeed.
That applies to social media producers who take on Content Creators and then pay them a salary. That makes for a steady paycheck, but there is another way to make money as a Content Creator: set up your own social media channel and do your creating for that. It’s a much riskier financial prospect, and you should have a backup plan, but people do make their living that way. Starting out, you’re going to be a one-person production unit and have to take care of your own editing duties, so you’ll need some aptitude with video editing software if you’re to launch yourself as Atlanta’s next great influencer.
You may have signed up for a video editing class because you had plans of founding a whole new cinematic nouvelle vague and calling it the Atlanta School, but you’re still going to have to eat while you’re establishing yourself as a cinematic auteur. You can’t spend your whole day stretched out on the grass in Piedmont Park, basking in the sun and rereading back issues of Cahiers du Cinéma, unless, of course, you’re independently wealthy. If you still need to make a living, you can do a lot to hone your craft by taking on work as a Videographer and Editor. You won’t get to direct the lifecycle events you’ll record, but you’ll be able to learn something about photography, how to be unobtrusive when you’re shooting footage of people, and get a chance to practice your editorial craft. Putting together a wedding video is going to exercise the same storytelling muscles as your first magnum opus about murder behind the doors of Woodhaven Road. Admittedly, Videographer and Editor positions don’t pay a fortune. Indeed’s figures range from $15,000 to $29,000, although it’s not always a full-time gig, which should leave you time to develop your Tuxedo Park screenplay and catch up on Cahiers du Cinéma after all.
And, if you really do want to make that film and found a whole new school of filmmaking, there’s nothing stopping you, except, of course, that little thing called money. Still, if your idea is good, you can probably cobble together enough funding to pick up a reliable camera at Wings Camera and get started on turning your screenplay into a reality. You may even have some friends who are starving actors and will work for Ms. Ruby’s Peach Cobbler Café gift cards. And you’ll need to know how to use editing software because, on your shoestring budget, you’re going to have to edit your footage yourself. Indeed’s figures for Filmmakers in Atlanta show the splendors and miseries of the entertainment industry: it has only two reported salaries, one of which is $31,000 and the other is $145,000. You should be able to guess which of the salaries is a better approximation of what you’ll make on that first movie you’ll be editing yourself.
If you open yourself to learning online, your possibilities for finding a video editing class will increase at least tenfold. A leading school that teaches its classes online as well as live in New York City is Noble Desktop. Its flagship video editing offering is a Video Editing Certificate that teaches students to use Adobe Premiere Pro, Audition (for audio editing), and After Effects (for creating motion graphics and all manner of fancy titles.) Students also construct a demo reel as part of the curriculum. The certificate program takes roughly a month to complete, and financing is available in various forms. Included with tuition are several 1-to-1 mentoring sessions that you can use for anything from advice for the job market to help with what you’ve studied in class, a one-year free retake option, Noble Desktop’s proprietary state-of-the-art workbooks, and class recordings that will allow you to look back and go over something you found confusing.
Noble Desktop offers other classes in the video editing department as well. The Video Editing and Motion Graphics Certificate contains all the classes in the Video Editing Certificate program, but with an additional module in advanced After Effects thrown in for good measure. If you want something less in-depth, you can sign up for the Premiere Pro Bootcamp that will get you started in editing with the software in under a week (if taken on weekdays, although the class is also available part-time in the evenings.) An advanced follow-up class is available to pair with it.
Are you tired of seeing what farming out video editing to a post-production house is doing to your advertising budget’s bottom line? Most social media and digital marketing editing is readily done in-house, and your existing team members can be taught to do it, gain a new skill in the process, and find a whole new exciting workplace activity.
Noble Desktop is capable of arranging classes in Premiere Pro for your employees who will have them conversant in the software in far less time than you might imagine. The curriculum can begin from zero, or it can be designed especially to fit your organization’s needs, with you choosing the start and endpoints. Noble can bring its expert instructors to your company’s offices and teach your team members live and in person, or the whole training can be delivered via Zoom or any other teleconferencing platform your organization uses. If you’d rather take advantage of Noble’s regularly scheduled classes and certificate programs in video editing, the school makes available a voucher system, enabling you to purchase as many seats as you wish for any of the school’s regularly scheduled classes. Interesting discounts are available for multiple purchases. Noble Desktop’s corporate sales department is at your disposal; don’t by any means hesitate to reach out with any questions you may have.
Atlanta’s professional scene is diverse and powerful, making it perfect for anyone looking to expand their skills in tech, design, business, or data. As one of the Southeast’s most important hubs for companies, the city brings together industries like finance, media, technology, and logistics. Through Noble Desktop’s network of experienced instructors, Atlanta-based professionals can access training from experts who truly understand the local job market.
Video editing blends storytelling, pacing, and technical skill to produce compelling content. In Noble Desktop's classes, learners study these techniques with instructors who have hands-on experience shaping professional video projects. These instructors have spent years in their fields and have developed a sense of pride in imparting their knowledge to others. This is a surefire way for students to turn their interests into real-world, applicable skills.
Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Willie Morris is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with over 30 years of experience leading initiatives across government, aviation, and transportation industries. Willie, a retired U.S. Air Force veteran, has also held roles with the Department of Homeland Security and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. He has served as a Registered Educational Provider with the Project Management Institute and an Authorized Training Partner with Rita Mulcahy Learning Solutions. Drawing on his background of teaching PMP Exam Prep Certification courses, Willie now instructs professionals in Atlanta and nationwide, helping teams in federal industries strengthen their leadership and project management skills.
Kimberly Peppers dedicated 37 years to federal service, building her career through a range of audit, budget, and program analysis roles. Over the course of those decades, she rose to senior leadership positions, including Regional Inspector General and Audit Director across different federal agencies. She earned her Doctorate in Business Administration while simultaneously working on audit and investigative assignments in the Middle East. After retiring from federal service, Kim continued work in the public sector by moving into the federal consulting field. She is also an instructor at Graduate School USA, teaching mainly finance and accounting classes.
With more than 20 years of both personal and professional involvement in government HR, Ashley is an experienced human resources professional and educator. She currently works as an instructor at Graduate School USA, where she earned a reputation for delivering comprehensive marketing, project management, and HR concepts in a clear, understandable way. Drawing on her extensive experience, Ashley brings a unique twist to her courses through real-life, practical examples that help students bridge the gap between theory and actual application of the skills. Ashley holds a Master’s in Public Administration and remains dedicated to strengthening the public service sector through professional development and advanced education.