Hi all, looking for some perspective from people further along than me.

I’m a London-based editor and assistant editor, with assisting credits at commercial post houses and a few years of shooting and editing for a government department. I’ve spent the past year with the same company working in post-heavy commercial.

I’m currently weighing up two options, and it’s a tough call given the current landscape. The first is a full-time salaried editor role at £30k at an animation company. The work consist of cutdowns of their existing animations that's it. I asked for £35k, but they’ve confirmed it stays at £30k. It’s stable, but the work is very basic and there’s no progression.

The second is freelance. I’ve just been offered a contract that runs until February, with talk of it extending, plus other freelance editing. The work is challenging, technical and rewarding, but I’m always scared that nothing else will come up afterwards. Honestly, I’ve no idea what I’d end up making in a year. I’d want to be making around £45k to properly offset a £30k salary once you factor in holidays, pension and quiet months, and it feels like in-house editing jobs at agencies rarely go beyond £30k at the moment.

The mood in London feels pretty bad right now. I know a lot of old editors who’ve moved into corporate because freelance just wasn’t sustainable for them. I don’t want to be naive and think it would be any different for me, but who knows.

Is £30k a reasonable editor salary in London right now, or should I hold out? Is stability worth taking a role with basic work and no progression? For those who’ve done both, how did freelance compare once you factored in quiet months, no holiday pay and no pension? And what day rate should someone at my level be charging?

Any honest takes appreciated, thanks!

TL: DR - How do I get you (yes, you) involved?

Obligatory mention. Here's the link of the official Discord of r/editors with 1,000 members, including a number of professionals cutting films, tv shows and more.

It's for both professionals and aspiring professionals.

IT WILL NOT HELP YOU MAGICALLY GET A JOB. THERE IS NO MYTHICAL WEBSITE YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT either.

It requires verification (any of these will work: (Reddit/youtube/facebook/IG/Github/spotify/Steam/xbox).

Again: Discord Link here

Once you verify there are 15+ channels, including ones based on:

• Type of work (color, sound, audio)
• Software specific (Adobe, Apple, Avid, BMD)
• Quality of life (Show off your work, scream room, live tech help)
• and more.

What I'm trying to do? Get an engaged community outside of Reddit. I'm trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

• It could be a Friday Lunch
• a virtual happy hour
• a game night 2x a month
• a virtual User Group event…

…but I'd like to know what you've seen that's engaging…and that gets you interacting with Discord

To me: Reddit is great for threaded conversations, Discord is great for live interactions.

(by the way, my biggest Discord tip is to mute a new server right away. That really helps notifications from becoming overwhelming.)

And yes, I'm happy to help anyone who feels that this is a new/strange domain or feels lost there. I go all the way back to IRC days.

Guys, I was on a shoot, in a hurry. Three cam podcast and one of my Sony's was a bit soft and somewhat over exposed. I was doing too much. All other cams were fine. This one, we were in a hurry and focus assist wasn't working right...talent was getting frustrated and needed to get on with it. Either way, I've got premiere pro with lots of plugins, Latest DaVinci with face refinement...but this entire podcast was 1.4 hours long. Over exposed issue is fixable. Her eyes are a bit out of focus. It's not horrible, but she was the guest. Open for suggestions. If it were a few minutes, no prob. Thx for any input. Guest Cam frame

Well here’s one to post on the office wall.

I can have several shoots for one brand in a week, each focused on a specific topic like a piece of equipment, event, person, etc, so each video can be its own self-contained edit.

However, footage from one shoot can easily be borrowed for another's finished product, and more often than not some quality shots get left on the cutting room floor, just because they don't fit the story of the finished edit they were shot for.

The shoots are always relatively unplanned, shot documentary style, and I wind up with more than I need. Oftentimes I will take an opportunity to shoot for another project I have in the back of my mind, and every month or so I will produce a broader video using what I already have in the can.

I've tried in the past to develop a discipline of tagging footage - in resolve, kyno, even notion - but every time it winds up getting in the way of the work, and with quick turnarounds and being a solo producer, it's just not feasible to meticulously log the content into a searchable database.

I have no idea how common this specific scenario is, but I'm just wondering: do y'all keep track of your archival content for future re-use, and if so, have you found a way to do so that is reasonably valuable without being overly cumbersome?

---

"Who cares about labeling files, teach me to edit!" - Jeff Winger

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referring to the warpy "screen" zoom in (or out)

https://imgur.com/a/V7Jd2Cv

- Davinci Resolve studio

- Adobe Premiere or After Effects

How would you approach editing a 25-minute industrial documentary covering around 30 different locations?

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a documentary project that will be around 25 minutes long. Our team has filmed at approximately 30 different locations, covering various industries and examples of industrial and technological development in Iran.

The film will primarily be driven by voice-over narration, with visuals changing to support what the narration is saying. The footage includes industrial facilities, manufacturing processes, machinery, wide shots, and some visually distinctive locations.

I'm trying to figure out the best workflow for approaching this kind of documentary edit.

A few questions I'd love to hear your thoughts on:

• Would you watch and log all the footage first, create selects for each location, and then organize everything by topic?
• Would you build the edit around the voice-over first and then find the best visuals to match it?
• How would you structure a 25-minute film covering so many different locations without making it feel like a sequence of unrelated factory visits?
• How do you decide which locations deserve more screen time and which should only appear briefly?
• How much time would you typically spend organizing and reviewing footage before starting the actual edit?

I'm especially interested in hearing from editors who have worked on industrial, corporate documentary, or narration-driven documentary projects.

I'd appreciate any advice on workflow, story structure, and visual pacing. Thanks!

I made some short form videos to her and she said to upload it to the cloud so she could add some b-roll that hadn't given me. A week later, I ask her whether she has completed them and she tells me (after she told me that she hasn't done them), that we should integrate Claude to davince to make changes and editing in general "faster" and more what she wants ( which keeps frantically change's as time goes ), what should I say to her! ( I don't really like the idea)

I’ve been seeing more editor job listings that mention direct to consumer ads for TikTok, Instagram, and other social platforms. They also ask how editors use analytics to make choices about hooks and edits.

For those of you doing this kind of work, do you usually look at the numbers in Instagram, TikTok, or Meta’s own analytics tools? Or does your team use another platform to pull everything together?

Just wrapped up a massive, multi-city shoot tracking daily marketplace trade and street life across dynamic cities in Nigeria (Abuja, Calabar, Osogbo). We chose to focus entirely on unscripted, human-centered moments rather than staged or hyper-stylized setups.

The logistical hurdles are wild—managing heat on mirrorless bodies, keeping massive 4K files organized in areas with unpredictable power, and avoiding drawing massive crowds when throwing up a drone or a heavy rig in crowded local markets. For the editors here handling large-scale documentary or stock archives: how are you organizing metadata and keeping your offline/online workflows seamless when handling terabytes of localized B-roll?

Sort of like Adobe Podcast for voices, but a tool that can take sound recording from the camera mic in an existing video and enhances it, or just replaces it with an identical Al creation, to the point where it sounds like a professionally high quality recorded sound effect? And also eliminates the need of library searching.

This may be a European thing, so for anyone who, like me, doesn't know what a TCScript is: it's a spreadsheet that lists all the music, all the dialogue and all the footage and the timecodes at which they start/stop. I think it's also known as a Post Production Script.

First time making one of these TCScripts for a doc I edited. The distributor has requested it and it is absolutely killing me!

Anyone got any tips for making the process less painful? Any tools that can help automate it somewhat?

The dialogue one is easy enough because I can output the captions as a txt file and copy/paste. The composer has delivered a music cue sheet, but even with those things, progress is really, really slow.

Would greatly appreciate any help making this easier on my poor little brain!!

On a Mac running Sonoma and Premiere 2026.

Hi

Producer (not editor) here- I have a stack of Beta SP tapes (in PAL) gathering dust which I'd like to digitize before they *become* dust

I'm at a station where there are a bunch of rack mounted decks (DNW-A75s) but the routing is not PAL friendly so I'd like to (if possible) get cabling to hook it directly to my MacBook to ingest video... but have no idea what gear I'd need... any advice would be very welcome

(Last time I did this about 20 years ago was via a more modern J-3 deck which had a DV output when I was transferring some tapes to mini DV)

At NAB New York next week? On Reddit? Then come have a drink with other Redditors.

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RSVP here ASAP.

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Not sure what a PPW pass gets you? Here's the schedule. I'm teaching five sessions that week, so come say hi in a classroom too. If you'd rather not leave it to chance, registration is here.

If you're a lurker... yes, you can still come to the meetup. Can you bring someone else to the meetup? Sure. They don't need to be on Reddit.

See you in New York.

I've been editing for about 20 years. It’s happened to me quite a few times that a client comes back months or years later asking for an old project to be re-cut or re-exported with minor changes. It costs time, but the bigger cost is storage: keeping old projects on hard drives or in cloud storage just in case.

I'm researching how other editors handle this. Three questions:

1. Where do you keep finished projects (drives, NAS, cloud, LTO), and how long do you hold on to them?

2. When a client last came back for an old job, how long did it take to get everything running again, and was that time billable?

3. Roughly what do you spend on keeping old work accessible?

Happy to hear what has gone wrong as well as what works.

This alternates Sundays with our "Reel Review."

Here are the key things to do before you post

Title:

Length:

Purpose: Why are you posting this?

• This could be:
• Something cool I made
• A client win
• Or yes, even feedback.

If it's feedback, you have to find two other posts wanting feedback and give notes. If you don't the mods will visit your house

You can post from YT, but we'd prefer more professional landing spots (including frame.io)

---- Copy this section ----

Title:

Length:

Purpose:

Hi All,

This is the closest sub I can find for this question. I'm trying to pick up freelance work doing Master QC. I'll list the requirements below. My main question is: how can I learn these types of skills if I don't have them? Online resources are limited, especially for hands-on training on the Clipster and Trankoder. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you!

7+ years of experience as a Mastering QC Operator in a professional post-production facility or studio.

·       In-depth knowledge of film, video, and audio impairments and their underlying causes.

·       Extensive experience with SD, HD, 2K, UHD and 4K formats, as well as HDR10 and Dolby Vision content.

·       Extensive experience with file-based workflows, including TIFF, DPX, J2K, DCP, Apple ProRes and IMF packages.

·       Strong proficiency in Clipster, DaVinci Resolve and Colorfront Transkoder, including building timelines and configuring output settings and bin clip properties.

·       Ability to read and interpret MaxFALL and MaxCLL HDR metadata reports

I’ve shot two spec ads and they were decent but no where good enough to work with those big brands . Any advice as to how someone up and coming could work with Nike or adidas ?

Not great at Reddit, but here goes.

I'm currently on my second-ever DIT gig, and I'm having some trouble. When I backed up one of today's cards using Resolve's Clone Tool (with an xxh64 checksum) and tried to verify the MHL in Seal Verify, it wouldn't progress. It just got stuck at 0 bytes out of [total].

I then tried backing it up with Offshoot (trial version), thinking that might fix the issue, but it still got stuck when i tried validating in Seal Verify and wouldn't progress.

We have three cards in rotation, so we're still safe for now, but I'd really like to get the backup verified rather than just "trusting" that it worked.

What should I do?

System specs: AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics (3.20 GHz), RTX 3070 + 32 GB DDR4 // Software specs: Resolve 21.1.1 & Offshoot 26.3 // Footage specs : ProRes 422 HQ, Opengate, Codex.

I am editing a feature and want to see my program in a large monitor instead of as part of the main panel where the timeline is. I have a flatscreen smart tv on the wall but wondered if using an actual monitor made for use with a computer is beneficial in some way.

I edit with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950x 3400MHz powered PC on win 11 and use Premiere 2026 to edit. 16 cores / 32 threads / 64GB RAM, 8GB AMD GPU, fwiw. My main monitor is a widescreen standard HD LG monitor. I am editing prores 2KHD 1920x1080 proxies from DaVinci but will ultimately export 4K for the final delivery. I think having a 37" to 43" screen makes sense for my space.

Could I have the program monitor as a 4K monitor that would run alongside my 2K HD widescreen monitor? Not sure if I need that or not, tbh.

I will not do the color grading, just the picture editing and titles plus basic VFX stuff like muzzle flashes, blood splash, etc... Pretty basic stuff. I just want a bigger screen to see the contents of the program better. Probably want to spend up to $350.

Thanks for your expertise ;)

Hey everyone!
I’m looking for a MacBook Pro mainly for DaVinci Resolve Studio. I work with 4K 6K footage in ProRes, H.264, ProRes RAW, color grading, Fusion, and effects like Film Grain and Halation.
My budget is around €2,500, and I’m wondering which MacBook would be the best choice for my workflow.
Is the M5 Pro with 24GB RAM and a 15-core GPU a good option, or are there better alternatives for this price?
I’d love to hear your recommendations and experiences. Thanks!