How to Become a Professional Video Editor: 6 Things That Matter
What does it take to become a professional video editor?
Becoming a professional video editor requires more than technical skill. It means learning to map emotion before you touch a timeline, building a reel with premium footage, polishing your work to broadcast standards, and actively pitching your services to the right clients instead of waiting to be found.
After cutting over $10 million worth of broadcast TV commercials over 20 years, I'd ignore almost everything I was originally taught if I had to start over. Here are the six things that kept my schedule filled with high-paying clients who treated me as a creative partner, not just a set of hands.
Map the story before you touch the timeline
I spent four long years experimenting with every technique, every piece of software, every plug-in, and every workflow. None of it made my flat edits any better. I thought I lacked talent, and it made me question if I should keep going with editing as a career at all.
That rock bottom is what finally pushed me to reach out to a pro editor and ask for help. He looked at what I'd been doing and didn't mince words. He told me I was treating editing like a technical skill. But the best editors who command the highest rates and secure clients who trust them creatively are emotional storytellers.
Now, before I touch my timeline, I map out the story and decide on a target emotion for every beat of it. If you think this is beginner advice, you couldn't be more wrong. It's still the single most important thing I do for every edit, 20 years into this.
My student David had been cutting for 20 years too, even for top ad agencies and brands, and the story and emotion map was still a revelation for him. Everything gets built with that emotional target in mind because it gives you your north star.
That's what I mean when I talk about learning to think like a broadcast editor. If you want the exact framework I use to map emotion before I edit, you can grab it in this free guide on how professional editors craft emotionally-impactful edits.
Cut for emotion, not just technique
Mapping the emotion is only half the job. Even after I started planning emotion before diving into my edits, they still came out flat at first. Planning the emotion is key, but you still have to know how to evoke it in your audience, and that's where the actual craft of editing comes in.
I bring out emotion with four tools:
- Story: what happens and when it happens
- Rhythm: the speed and visual patterns of your cuts
- Sound: the world you build through ambience, dialogue editing, sound effects, and music
- Action: where you cut in and out of each shot
Map the emotion, then ask which of these techniques has the best chance of landing that emotional target with your audience. My approach to this is laid out in more detail in how to edit for emotion using professional steps.
My student Guzman stopped chasing the technical side of editing and started using these techniques to evoke a target emotion. His edits began to stand out, and he booked his first five-figure client. After the program, he was able to work on the foundational skills of editing and book that first five-figure project.
Build a reel with footage worthy of your skills
Even after breaking through on emotional storytelling, I ran into another wall. Most of the editing work I was getting were corporate videos, so I didn't have access to high production value stories that could show off what I'd just learned.
This is one of the biggest catch-22s in this industry. Your show reel shows the work you've done, not the work you want to do. Twenty years ago, when I figured this out, I started contacting every filmmaker I could find who was making the kind of high production value stories I wanted to work on.
Eventually I broke through and got to use my emotional storytelling skills on projects worthy of them, just like my student Jacob did. He said the commercial spec ads were probably his favorite part, since the course stresses emotional storytelling and he hadn't had the chance to do that basically his whole career.
His new reel landed him a dream gig. Within five months, he was making $2,000 a week doing projects he actually loved.
Polish your reel to broadcast standards
Imagine a songwriter who records a killer song with great lyrics, but records it on her laptop's internal mic. If the song is emotionally moving, it'll probably still get some traction despite the poor quality. But you need both the emotional and the technical for your work to actually take off.
In the world of social media, there really are no technical standards anymore. That's created a gap in knowledge on how to bring an edit up to the quality we've come to expect from TV shows or feature films.
Once you've made strides in emotional storytelling and applied them to worthy projects, it's time to add color correction, sound mixing, and export settings that give your work that broadcast polish. Combine that with strong emotional storytelling, and you'll be able to command higher rates, the way my student Raj did.
Just recently, Raj was on a call with one of his social media clients and charged 25 to 30% more than he typically used to. The client happily agreed.
Position your portfolio the right way
Even with strong editing skills, you can still get overlooked. Imagine walking into a restaurant with a Michelin star chef in the kitchen, but the waiter hands you a cardboard menu with stains on it, falling apart, with food photos taken in bad lighting on an old phone. Are you going to order, or go somewhere else?
I've met so many editors who are like that Michelin star chef. My student Imran had great editing skills, he just needed help presenting his work the right way. When he did, the results were incredible. He went from zero clients and zero editing gigs to a full-time job offer from a well-known company at about $84,000 a year. He credits the portfolio as the reason he got the job.
It doesn't have to be complicated. A single-page web portfolio, a short show reel of your best clips, a professional headshot, and a professional email address for clients to reach you in one click is enough. This is the same territory covered in how to fix your video editing portfolio to land high-end clients.
Pitch the clients you actually want
You know the old saying: if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you're editing showreel-worthy work and nobody's watching, will you get a job?
Having a great show reel is only half the battle. Getting it in front of the right people is the next step. I've talked to hundreds of editors, and most of us have two things in common. We're introverts, which is why we don't mind long hours alone in the dark. And the idea of selling ourselves makes our skin crawl.
Here's what I'd do for the next 30 days. Reach out to two people a day, with three caveats:
- They need the exact type of editing work you're best at, the kind you've already gotten clients results with
- Send a personal email with a show reel that shows the exact type of work they need
- Make sure your portfolio is positioned in a pleasing way, as covered in the portfolio section above
My student Rob followed this plan and only a couple of months after the course, booked his first really big client, a $12,000 project. He said that for him, it was confirmation this would work.
Booking a $12,000 client didn't happen because Rob got lucky or suddenly grew a salesy personality. It happened because he had a clear, simple process for putting the right work in front of the right people.
That's the same process I break down further in how to land higher-paying video editing clients in 3 steps.
The six things aren't the whole story
That's the full list. Map the story, cut for emotion, build your reel, polish it, position your portfolio, and pitch premium projects. But the six things aren't even the most important part.
It's the hundreds of things I didn't include on this list that are distracting you from having a sustainable editing career you love, one where you're paid well and working on projects you care about with people who respect you.
You can absolutely go do these six things on your own and see real success. But if you want to fast-track it, I built an 8-week editing program where I personally guide you through these six steps, called Edit Like A Broadcast Pro. My students are getting results like David, Rob, Guzman, Imran, and Jacob did, and you can learn more about the program here.
