Guidance about looking for an editor

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Mario69Rossi

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Guidance about looking for an editor

PostWed Nov 16, 2022 12:12 pm

I have a small YouTube channel (8K sub) about bicycle travelling.

Editing the weekly vlogs is very time consuming and I'm thinking about hiring an editor to help me speeding the workflow as it's too hard to travel and publish one vlog a week as well.

My budget is very small as I'm earning from adsense about 45/55€ per month so that my budget for 4 videos a week for an editor. I checked on fiver.com and freelancer.com and there are people willing to do it for that cheap.

Given I usually have between 40 mins to 1 hour 20 mins of clips mostly from GoPro and Insta Go2 - how can I trust an editor to cut down to a vlop of 15 to 25 minutes? I mean even if I was hiring an expert expensive editor how can I trust him/her with my story?
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Ellory Yu

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostThu Nov 17, 2022 7:37 am

An experienced editor will work with you to understand your vision and story. That’s how they can deliver quality but at a premium. You just don’t hand over the materials and tell them to go at it. If you hire someone from FiveRR or freelance then it will be more of the latter; and for that is what you get on the cheap. Anyone can cut hours long down to 25 minutes. Only you can tell your story in that 25 minutes.
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AlwaysWritePat

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostThu Nov 17, 2022 12:27 pm

age old case of time vs money...

if you want the channel to continue growing either spend the time or money, no way around it.

If its time, you can properly do it yourself and tell what you want, how you want it.

cheap Fiverr editors, is kind of a get-what-you-pay-for thing
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Mario69Rossi

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostThu Nov 17, 2022 1:21 pm

Yeah maybe it's not the time yet to have an editor but I should do it myself.
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Ellory Yu

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostThu Nov 17, 2022 3:07 pm

Mario69Rossi wrote:Yeah maybe it's not the time yet to have an editor but I should do it myself.

Or at least have a rough cut done by you and then find an affordable editor to smooth it out. That way, it's a cut of your story.
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Steve Fishwick

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostFri Nov 18, 2022 5:45 pm

Mario69Rossi wrote:My budget is very small as I'm earning from adsense about 45/55€ per month so that my budget for 4 videos a week for an editor. I checked on fiver.com and freelancer.com and there are people willing to do it for that cheap.


I urge you to take the advice here and cut those videos yourself. Those poor people on fiver.com are often in the highly exploited 3rd world. No competent professional editor (in the West, that is) could possibly work for such rates for such material, where such rates would represent less than an hour often, which given your stated material would hardly cover viewing time alone. I understand though, you are working to a very limited budget yourself and I wish you the best.
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Mario69Rossi

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostWed Nov 23, 2022 12:37 pm

Timothy Love wrote:You get what you pay for


My question was regardless of the price. Even if I could spend hundreds or thousands, my doubts still stand.
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Ellory Yu

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostWed Nov 23, 2022 5:02 pm

Timothy Love wrote:You get what you pay for

This comment doesn’t help the OP. I agree that there is substantial cost to get someone who knows what they are doing and can do a good job and collaborate with the director to implement their vision. However in the OP case, I think it is best to do the rough cut himself and then pay for someone who will help clean up the edit. This is probably save some money for the OP. I’ll leave it at that. Good luck.
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Mario69Rossi

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostThu Nov 24, 2022 3:12 pm

That's probably the way I'll do it.

I'm thinking about a workflow with cloud project and proxies where the editor could do a timeline with all the clips in chronological order because at the moment it takes me a long time to piece it together chronological.

Then I can do a rough cut and send it back for smoother editing and music addition.

Once done I can go through it a final time and then render it out for upload.
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Ellory Yu

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostFri Nov 25, 2022 7:34 am

This is just a workflow suggestion. If you are using a BM camera, it would be best if you can label the slate metadata with scene and take numbers and mark those ones with good take as “Good Take”. Then in Resolve, you can filter and sort them into a working bin. You can filter with timecode too which will give you a chronological set. Then bring up the cut page and use the source tape and have it sorted by timecode or scene, whichever you prefer. From there you can scroll through the source tape and mark those clips to bring into the timeline. In Resolve 18.1, you can now do multiple in/out mark points on the source tape which makes this super easy and efficient.

If you didn’t do the metadata in camera, don’t fret. You can still update the clip metadata in Resolve. It just requires a bit more work.
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Mario69Rossi

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostFri Nov 25, 2022 12:45 pm

I use a GoPro7, an insta350 Go2, and recently a DJI mini
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GalinMcMahon

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Re: Guidance about looking for an editor

PostMon Dec 19, 2022 8:41 pm

I would post it as a job and clearly lay out the rate and expectations. There are a lot of new editors who will take ANY paid gig to build a reel. I've done plenty of free work and edits for a coffee in the past. Now I have an okay reel and I charge more but I wouldn't have gotten even this far without taking some jobs that most people poo-poo.

And before the bandwagon jumps in, I know, I know: low paying gigs bring rates down. But do they really? OP obviously won't get top-level editing which is what clients pay the bigger bucks for. If you're charging $2k / hour then your stuff is amazing and that client would never hire someone at this rate. That tired excuse is like saying that a used car lot selling a Geo Metro that doesn't really run is going to ruin things for the lot across the street selling new Ferraris. Drive what you can afford.
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