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Video editing is the process whereby bits of film are stitched together to make a movie. In that definition, two words—film and movie—are used in their broadest senses, as most of what is shot today isn’t photographed onto actual celluloid film, and not every completed video project is a film people go to the cinema to watch after having been price-gouged at the popcorn counter.
Editing is the chief operation for the post-production phase of the creation of a video project, the last part of a process that begins in pre-production with the development of a script and continues through the production phase, during which actual shooting takes place. At the end of shooting, what will be a movie is just a tangle of individual takes that were shot out of their order in the script. Turning that raw material into a cohesive whole is the job of the Video Editor.
Back when there was celluloid and video editors were called film editors, the editing process took place in the semi-Sumerian darkness of a windowless cutting room. The editor and an assistant took charge of large bins of all the film shot during production and, working with the script, assembled the pieces in what they decided was the proper sequence, starting at the beginning, and making their way to the end. The resulting reels of film were known as a workprint, which was made from the negative that emerged from the camera after processing.
The tools of the editors’ trade bordered on the rudimentary: a guillotine splicer (or sometimes just a good pair of scissors) to cut the strips of film and audio tape and a roll of Scotch tape with sprocket holes in it to connect them. The only thing that required an electrical outlet was the Moviola, a contraption not all that unlike Edison’s kinetoscope, minus the hand crank, in that it really allowed only one person to view the film as it was fed through the machine. The alternative to a Moviola was called a Steenbeck; it was a larger piece of equipment that looked a bit like a four-burner range, and was used especially for the painstaking process of cutting the movie’s one-of-a-kind negative.
Things have changed radically since the 1990s, when nonlinear editing (NLE) was introduced, and the whole process migrated into the insides of a computer. Film, rather than being sliced up physically, was digitized and, eventually, replaced by digital technology that recorded the images to a hard drive or a memory card. Strips of print film turned into digital files, and a whole new world of technology was brought in to allow the editors to do their work with keyboards, mice, and monitors rather than cutters, tape, and a Moviola. Avid Film Composer led the revolution, releasing both software and the hardware to run it on (“the Avid”) in 1992. As computers caught up with the capabilities of editing software, the need for a dedicated machine all but vanished, and Avid rechristened and released its software under the name of Avid Media Composer.
Other software alternatives soon appeared on the market, notably Adobe Premiere (now Premiere Pro) and Apple’s Final Cut Pro. Today’s landscape has a wide variety of NLE software from which to choose, including free entries such as DaVinci Resolve, iMovie (which comes with every Mac) and a streamlined version of Premiere Pro called Premiere Rush, which was designed for on-the-fly editing of short videos, generally for social media.
Nonlinear editing (the term was coined in the early 1990s; prior to that, there was no need for a term to distinguish the one extant process for film editing from anything else) operates entirely digitally, making cuts and allowing the editor a degree of freedom that was impossible in the days of the cut-and-spliced workprint. The term nonlinear derives from the fact that there is no longer a need to edit the film in script order: the editing interface features a timeline that keeps the whole project in place, and it takes only a drag and a drop to shift a shot or an entire sequence from one place in the timeline to another. The editor can thus easily do things such as turn a sequence into a flashback by picking it up and dropping it into a position later in the film.
NLE software can also do things that weren’t within the capabilities of an old-style cutting room. Titles and optical effects such as ripple dissolves once had to be farmed out to specialized labs that used heavy equipment to create what can now be done as simply as typing out the desired text or as pushing a few buttons to create the ripple effect. The software can also repair and sweeten a film’s audio as needed, and even add a score by drawing music from various online libraries. You can then modify that in terms of pitch, or, again at the touch of a button, have the machine fit it precisely to the length of the sequence you wish to score. Special effects and motion graphics are also within the capabilities of these programs or associated programs such as Adobe After Effects, which can produce animations of such things as a paddle of platypodes boarding a Red Line MARTA train or a mob of giant purple kangaroos running amok at Peachtree Center. These can then be dropped right into Premiere Pro and assembled as part of your cinematic fantasy about a monotreme and marsupial invasion of the Big Peach.
Video editors are artists as well as artisans, and, in the final analysis, movies are made in the cutting room. Writers and directors have their roles, and, true, the director gets to work on the rough cut to produce an eponymous second cut, but the linchpin of the entire process is the editor. There’s a lot more to it than just stitching bits of film together.
Video editing training isn’t going to teach you how to send a rocket to space: it’s going to teach you how to be a Video Editor, using one of the various types of NLE software available. While Avid Media Composer still accounts for the editing of most of the really big Hollywood projects, Premiere Pro was used to edit the Best Picture Oscar winner for 2023, Everything Everywhere All at Once (it also won the Best Editing award), and Final Cut Pro was used to edit two further Best Editing Oscar winners, The Social Network (2011) and Parasite (2019). Every movie has to be edited, unless you want to shoot your whole film in one take, as was the case with The Wedding Party (2016) and Let’s Scare Julie (2019). That’s whether it be a blockbuster, a Netflix series, or an unassuming documentary about the history of peach cobbler. Even live news shows and sporting events have pre-edited feature segments.
Most people who edit video today are, however, more likely to be working on social media posts rather than feature films. There is an inexorable need for new video content on YouTube and Instagram, and the trick to success on any social media platform is to post regularly. That means shooting regularly and editing regularly so that you can make your self-imposed deadlines. Of course, you can always post junky footage you shot with your phone camera over the heads of several hundred people of the fireworks at Magic Kingdom, but that’s going to look like junky footage you shot with your phone camera over the heads of several hundred people. Nobody’s going to watch that, especially as there’s professional-quality coverage of the Magic Kingdom fireworks already on YouTube. If it’s clicks and subscribers you’ll be wanting, you’ll have to do better than that, and one of the keys to doing better with a social media video post is to edit it well. Even if your post is just your head talking, you’re going to want to create visual interest by cutting away to other images, and that’s going to mean editing.
There are also hobbyist uses for video editing such as people who want to arrange their vacation footage into a watchable highlight reel. While this can be done using professional-grade software, there are scaled-down programs that give laypeople the tools they need to work on these kinds of projects. Adobe Premiere Elements is one such example, and, unlike most Adobe programs, it’s available for outright purchase rather than by (costly) subscription. You don’t need to show your A.C.E. dues statement to purchase a subscription to Premiere Pro: you’re welcome to use it, even if it is only for the footage you shot at Disney World last year.
Whichever NLE software you intend to pursue, your editing course is going to cover much the same terrain, although different features will be taught in 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. Up next will probably be working with audio, and then 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 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 odd plug-in to create dissolves, fades, wipes and other, fancier, transitions between shots. You can also create basic animations, or bring in more software to make 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.)
YouTube has a Total Beginner’s Guide to Video Editing; it lasts six minutes. That’s like the owl saying that it takes three licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell advocates that mastery of just about anything can be achieved through 10,000 hours of practice. Although critics have enjoyed debunking Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, the heart of its argument is the old adage that practice makes perfect. Does it take 10,000 hours to learn video editing? For basic competency in one of the editing programs, no, you don’t need nearly that much time. For mastery of editing in all its aspects, you probably do need 10,000 hours, which comes down to 250 40-hour workweeks, thus, five years on the job. When you look at it that way, Gladwell’s rule doesn’t seem as far-fetched (or as enormous) as all that. As for how long it takes to learn enough to get a job as an apprentice editor (or cobble together relatively simple social media videos), you should think in terms of weeks rather than years; certainly a month of full-time study of any one of the various professional options should be sufficient.
If you want to learn to edit video, learn any other tech-related workplace skill, or learn how to play pinochle, you have basically three choices. It can be done live and in-person, it can be done (synchronously) online, and it can be done in a self-paced (asynchronous) online course.
The live and in-person class is probably what you think of when you think of learning something. Unless you had the misfortune to be in school in 2020 (when the world learned, to its dismay, that children cannot be taught online), your educational experience growing up always involved being in a room with other students and a teacher armed with a whiteboard or an overhead projector. That meant you were able to ask the teacher a question (or to go to the bathroom) by raising your hand. It also meant you could pass notes, read Anna Karenina under your desk when the class got boring, and couldn’t chew gum.
That’s all very well and good, and it has the force of tradition behind it, but the advent of the internet opened up new vistas in learning, and, for over twenty years now, people have been studying online. Live online classes are basically live in-person classes, with the obviously not insignificant difference that you’re not under the same roof as your instructor. That difference does by no means preclude the ability to communicate with your teacher: you just have to make desperate flailing motions with your arms into your camera and pretend you’re drowning to get called on. Or you can just raise your hand; that will work, too. And you’ll be spared the commute to wherever your class is: given the traffic situation in Atlanta, that’s a huge blessing. You get to choose the quiet room (a lock on the door is recommended) from which to follow the course, which you can do in a comfortable chair of your own choosing, without having to worry about makeup, shaving, or even taking off your pajamas, in which some people do their best thinking.
There is a third way of learning online, one which does not put you at the same moment in time as your instructor, and, thus, gets called by the pretentious-sounding word asynchronous. These classes consist of video tutorials you can view at your absolute leisure. Some of them (generally the more expensive ones) do offer something like office hours or at least email support that will give you a chance to ask a human being any questions you may have, but, for the most part, you’re going to be on your own. The freedom to study where and when you want is a very attractive aspect of the asynchronous class. You can even go in for a change of scenery after a few hours of watching lessons about video editing, and take your computer to build your own breakfast biscuit at the West Egg Cafe on the Westside. Asynchronous classes are generally more affordable than live ones, but there are drawbacks to the arrangement. The most sizable of these is that, unlike live class syllabi, pre-recorded video tutorials don’t evolve along with the software they’re teaching and become out of date, perhaps not as quickly as skim milk, but quickly just the same. The other fly in the asynchronous ointment is that video tutorials don’t provide anyone to crack the whip and make sure you complete your course. It takes a great deal of conscientious stick-to-itiveness to finish a self-paced class in something as complex as video editing, and the inescapable reality is there’s a good chance you won’t see yourself through it, despite having started off with the best of intentions.
Online resources for learning video editing, starting with that six-minute video mentioned above, are unquestionably abundant. That doesn’t mean they’re good, since any self-styled expert can post on YouTube. That’s not to say all the free online resources are inadequate. Established IT schools such as Noble Desktop and the manufacturers themselves (including both Avid and Adobe) offer video tutorials for free that will help you learn at least something about how to use video editing software. Some of the other tutorials on YouTube are worth your time, but the question is, how to tell which are good and which are going to confuse you, teach you stuff you don’t need to know, or leave out some critically essential bits. Ultimately, trying to teach yourself how to use Premiere Pro, Media Composer, or any of the other professional video editing programs is a bit like trying to teach yourself Scottish country dancing: some activities just require other human beings.
The thing you really need to learn alongside whichever video editing class you take (unless you’re signing up for an all-inclusive film school education) is the artistic aspect of the profession. 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 reading. Among the best titles in the field are The Technique of Film Editing by Czech-British director (The Gambler and The French Lieutenant’s Woman) Karel Reisz, a veritable philosophical treatise on the whys of editing; film noir director (Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire) Edward Dmytryk’s On Film Editing: An Introduction to the Art of Film Construction; and the acclaimed In the Blink of an Eye, whose editing credits include Apocalypse Now, all three Godfather movies, The English Patient, and no fewer than three Oscars. These are all classics that describe the analog editing process, but are definitely not to be despised on that count. If you want something more modern that takes into account NLE techniques, you might consider The Art of the Cut, a book of curated conversations with 50 major contemporary film editors. Any of these will help you to realize that editing is more than a matter of dragging and dropping and pressing buttons, that there’s an art to it, and that creativity, the storyteller’s bent, and a sense of how to make engrossing and attractive series of images are all qualities any good editor must possess.
Video content is ubiquitous in today’s world, something that widens the net considerably when it comes to the applicability of video editing skills across industrial boundaries. 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.
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% base tax credit to any production spending more than $500,000 on production expenses in the state, which, combined with the ranges of scenery available in Georgia, and a year-round climate, have 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, and there’s a great deal more to cinematic Georgia beyond that, making Atlanta into something along the lines of 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 video in need of being coherently assembled into something that will continue to garner views and gain more subscribers.
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. That makes for a lot of footage requiring solid editing.
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.) 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 that 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 an inevitable 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 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.
Georgia Film Academy, organized in 2015 as a collaboration between the University System of Georgia and the Technical College System of Georgia, is designed to provide the state’s booming film production sector with an in-state workforce to meet the substantial crew demands that have come with Georgia’s cinematic success. GFA’s Film & Television Post-Production offering is a lengthy certificate program (it takes over a year to complete) that is focused on Avid Media Composer 100 and Avid Pro Tools 100 for sound design. The program concludes with an internship/apprenticeship program that the school designed in conjunction with major production companies active in Georgia as well as with the IATSE local. Classes take advantage of the state-of-the-art facilities at Trilith Studios in Fayetteville. Financial aid is available.
Michael Snodgrass Training is a small school that offers classes in most of the Adobe Creative Cloud, including Premiere Pro. Located in Suwanee, MST offers two levels of Premiere Pro instruction: beginner and advanced. The Fundamentals class starts off teaching students how to organize a project, and sees them through to exporting the results after having applied the software’s basic techniques. The advanced class covers video effects, audio enhancement, color corrections, captioning and multicam editing. Classes are offered onsite at the student’s location (or via the internet) and are limited to six participants. Customized individual training is also available upon request.
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.
A further option is the Six-Week Intensive on Editing course available online from Manhattan Edit Workshop, a New York City-based school that, as you probably can imagine, specializes in editing training for its students. The Intensive class covers Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Avid Media Composer. The program includes remote screenings and even an artist-in-residence program. The student-to-teacher ratio is maintained at 6:1, and the program includes coaching on resumes and cover letters, as well as editing and reviewing the students’ demo reels. The school also teaches shorter courses in Media Composer, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and even Photoshop.
Home base for Key Code Education, a school designed to prepare students for careers in the entertainment industry, is Burbank, California, although it teaches extensively online as well. (The Pacific time zone schedule may be attractive to Atlantans who are late risers.) The school offers an Avid Media Composer Fundamentals I course that introduces participants to the software’s basic functions. The school’s other offerings include a follow-up to the introductory Media Composer class, along with other courses in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, and even one in Adobe Premiere Engineering and Advanced Operations that goes into the technical side of the software, so participants gain the knowledge necessary to install, troubleshoot and maintain the hardware necessary to seeing a large-scale video project through its post-production phase in the most efficient and dependable way possible.
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.