Quick backstory: I recently wrote and acted in a short film – one of those projects that are not gonna win a lot of awards, but are so valuable in keeping creative momentum going in between other projects. A passion project, if you will. We had a team in place, complete with editor and colorist. But as shooting wrapped and we moved into post-production, well, life happened. We’d lost our editor and colorist. Because this was an ultra-low budget passion project, I didn’t want neither myself or the producer to spend anymore money finishing the short, so I took it upon myself to get the whole thing over the finish line. And though the result may have been better with professional help, I’m incredibly happy about this turn of events. Because as the old saying (sort of) goes: What doesn’t kill your film, makes you smarter.

Learn as you go?

In most aspects of filmmaking I take an approach of equal measures academic diligence and reckless, creative abandon. Perhaps with just a pinch of luck and lots of Command-Z. As I was getting started on the coloring process, however, I quickly realized I needed a slightly different approach.

#1. Familiarize yourself with the tools. All of them.

Before taking your very first look at an RGB Parade, know what it means and what it does. Same goes for waveform monitors, vectorscopes, the Ansel Adams Zone System, and so on and so forth. Don’t just know what you need to know about one of these tools. Know them all. Only then will you know where to look for help when your eyes are deceiving you.

#2. Understand light.

Your cinematographer will no doubt be doing her very best to light and shoot a scene in a way that will require the minimum amount of exposure correction or tinkering with shadows and highlights, but even so, you will need to adjust these things in post. To properly do so, you need to understand light. Shadows, midtones and highlights all affect the image in very different ways and each can be used to both balance a picture and set a mood.

#3. Understand color.

As with the shadows, midtones and highlights in your image, your reds, greens and blues all affect the look and balance in tremendously different ways. Together lighting and color is what makes your image what it is; cinematic, flat, emotional, cool, vibrant. So understand what it does to your image when you lower the reds in your highlights or increase the blues in your shadows.

#4. Respect the workflow.

The first mistake I made as I started the coloring process was to go directly for the end result. It’s the reckless, creative abandon in me. I knew what I wanted the image to look like, so obviously it would save me tons of time if I just went straight to the color wheel and started turning the knobs. I was wrong. Respect the workflow. Start with the necessary adjustments to exposure, fine-tune the dynamic range, balance the color and then match your shots. Only then – when you have a series of well-balanced and well-matched shots – can you start creating the look you want. If you go the other way around, you’ll spend way too much time fumbling around with colors and lighting, trying to match the shot that came before. Before you get creative, be scientific. Use the tools (#1) and your knowledge (#2 and #3) to first fix what needs fixing.

#5. Watch the tutorials. All of them.

Whether you’re about to start color grading your own film for the very first time or never have any intention of ever doing so, do yourself a favor and watch the tutorials. Even if you’re gonna leave the technical stuff to someone else, just knowing about the process, the tools and the challenges will make it so much easier when you’re trying to explain what you want the final picture to look like. If you’re gonna watch just one tutorial on the subject, Color Grading Central is a good place to begin. Here’s the first in a free series of 15 video tutorials (and one bonus tutorial) taking you through all the steps of color grading in Final Cut Pro X. The tools may differ slightly if you’re using Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, but the fundamentals are the same.

Now, get creative.

An assistant editor’s first and most important responsibility is to make the editing process as smooth as possible. On a feature where footage will be coming in over a period of time this means communicating with the camera and sound departments to understand their workflow and the process by which the footage is being shot, downloaded and delivered. Understanding the type of camera and what kind of footage files are going to be delivered helps determine the post production workflow and whether the footage will need to be offlined and synced with the external sound files.

Need a refresher on post-production workflow? Check out this article.

The assistant editor’s duties include prepping the editing system for the editor. The first step of prep is to log the footage into the system. This means downloading the dailies from the hard drive, and, if the project is following an offline/online workflow, transcoding them to the offline format. Organization of the files is key not just in how and where they’re downloaded, but also what the file names are going to be.

But, wouldn’t it be easier to simply use the numbers generated by the camera? While the answer might be yes when you’re first downloading the footage, it quickly turns into a no when it’s crunch time and the editor is searching for their shot.

In naming files, I recommend using a system that includes the date the footage was shot (so that is can be easily referenced/ compared to the camera logs) the scene number, the camera (if it’s a multi-camera production), and the take number. So, if a scene 15 was shot on the A cam on May 25^th, 2015, the file name would be: 20150525_Scene015_CamA_Take001.

It is also during the logging process that the assistant editor will review the footage for any technical issues, such as picture and sound not syncing properly or a discrepancy in timecode, and add descriptions or what is called metadata. The best way to think of metadata is to think of it as keywords that are easily searchable. If the editor is looking for a particular shot of scene, they can search the metadata and find takes that match what they’re looking for.

Working in Premier? Here’s a great tutorial on how to customize you metadata!

Okay, so the clips are logged and the metadata has been added, but the prep isn’t finished. The clips must be organized in bins. For a feature, bins might be organized by scene. On a documentary, they could be organized into bins for each interviewee and a sub-bin for that interviewee’s B-Roll. If several editors are working on a project, such as a reality show, then creating a universal bin structure that will exist from episode to episode will greatly help with the organization. This is because even though each editor will in evidently customize their specific project file to their needs, having a universal structure will mean that the assistant editor will not have to go searching when it’s time to transfer files or work in said editor’s project.

Once the logging, adding of metadata and organization of the bin structure is complete, it’s time for the assistant editor to hand the project to the editor. This, however, does not mean that the assistant editor’s job is over. Editors rely on the assistant’s knowledge of the footage, and to troubleshoot any trouble with the editing software, be it Premiere, Final Cut Pro or Avid. This means that the assistant editor needs to know the program inside and out.

But where’s the artistry? Believe it or not, there is artistry in organization and technical knowledge. You are taking the raw elements are creating the building blocks (or legos) that they editor will then use to assemble the story. How you build and organize those blocks has a direct artistic relationship with what gets built.

Speaking of, let’s take a moment to remember this creative little story – that used nothing but blocks (or legos, rather):

Like all relationships in filmmaking, the relationship between the Editor and Assistant Editor is one of trust, support and teamwork. The editor has to trust that the assistant editor will organize and work with them to make the editing process a smooth one. The editor also has to trust the assistant editor understands that there is a bigger picture. Indeed, if the editor trusts the assistant editor, they will ask them to edit a rough assembly of a scene that the editor will they take and refine. Thus monitoring how the editor is bringing the story together is key because those rough assemblies need to have the same tone and emotion as what’s being editing.

Picture Locked – but wait, the job’s not done!

Once the editor is complete and picture lock has been achieved, it is the assistant editor who will take the project and begin the conforming process. The assistant editor will also be responsible to deliver the audio output to the sound designer. Indeed, the assistant editor can stay with a project long after the editor is complete, thus like I said from the beginning, they are the red blood cells of post-production!

On a final note, here’s a pretty accurate look/listen into the life of an assistant editor:

To begin, one must understand that historically there are actually two stages in post-production, namely offline editing and online editing.

What is offline editing? In short, it’s the stage where your raw footage is run through a program that transcodes it to have a lower resolution. You can then use that lower resolution footage to edit your film. Think of this as the storytelling stage. The editor focuses on the timing of the cuts, the pacing of story, and communicating emotions.

Online editing, better thought of as the finishing stage, is where you’ll reconnect those low-resolution files to the original, full quality footage. This is also when color correction, effects work, final titles, and audio are brought into the film. It’s at the end of the online stage that you export your completed film.

To illustrate the need for two stages, take a look at this chart and notice the ‘processing power needed’ axis:

Wouldn’t it be faster to just edit the high-resolution footage? Programs like Premiere do claim you can edit natively, but the answer is in your question: 4K files are HUGE. 4096*2160 pixels, to be exact!.The speed at which an editor can work depends on their software (the editing system they’re using) and their system’s hardware (the actual computer they’re editing on).

So while programs like Premiere are able to edit several high-resolution tapeless formats natively, your editor’s system still needs to have powerful hardware. Every time a cut or change is made in the timeline, the computer’s CPU has to process the large files. If the hardware can’t keep up, the editor will have slow playback, the system could potentially crash and, worst of all, the footage could be damaged. Situations like that will absolutely slow down your editing process.

And please take a note from a post-coordinator: Always, always, always have at least one back-up hard drive of your footage… ALWAYS!

There’s also another place where you can lose time; when actually trying to view the rough cut. Often cuts of the in-process film will be uploaded to a dropbox account, google drive, privately on youtube or vimeo or even to an FTP. If your editor is working natively, in 4K resolution, they are going to have export a compressed (smaller) version of the film to upload. Exporting and compressing a 4K file is going to take more time than exporting and compressing a lower-resolution file.

So, you filmed footage; you’ve got those files on an external hard drive… What’s the first step in the offlining process?  

To begin, a project will be made that brings in (imports) the full resolution files. This is a project that you won’t go back to until the offline process is complete.

The next step is to transcode. Simply put, that means turning (transcoding) the raw, high-resolution files into offline, low-resolution files.

Let’s be clear. When you transcode footage to have a lower resolution (in the above picture’s case, a 1920*1080 proxy file), you’re not changing the original quality of the footage. You’re making a lower quality copy that your editor’s system can easily edit. And in the case of 4K, you’ll still be working with high-definition footage.

When going through the offline process, I recommend transcoding your media into half the pixel size of your original media. So if you shot 4K, you’ll go to 1920*1080. I also recommend using the Pro Res 422 Proxy codec. Many sites will recommend using Pro Res 422 HQ, but I find that proxy is even easier on the system and the image quality between the two, in the offline stage, is negligible.

If you want to brush up on your knowledge of codecs before moving on, take a peek at this tutorial:

How do I transcode? That’ll depend on your footage and the editing software you’ll be using. Media Encoder is great when using Premiere, because they’re both in the Adobe family. Compressor could also be used for both Premiere and those that still edit in Final Cut. Another application, specific to RED footage, is REDrushes.

Once the lower-resolution footage has been made, it will be brought in (or imported) into a new offline project. That’s when the editor is free to work their magic.

Once the film is completed and, therefore, deemed locked, it’s time for the online process to begin.

The online process (also called the conform) means you’re taking the locked offline edit and reconnecting the used footage to its full-resolution parent. When using programs like Premiere and Final Cut, this starts by generating an EDL of the timeline.

An EDL is basically a reference file of your movie that your editor will open in the original project that contains the full resolution files. Once opened, the full resolution files connect and the timeline of your movie is now online.

But alas, we’re not done. Once the timeline of your movie is online, it’s time to color correct, do effects work and bring in the final audio mix. When all those elements come together, it’s time to export. And voilá, you’ve made a movie!

Remember: Creating a post-production workflow is about creating an environment where you and the editor can focus on your film. If this all seems like an unnecessary amount of effort and you just wanna get your masterpiece through post as quickly as possible, take a second with this countdown of some of the most effective editing moments in film history. It will make you appreciate the time and care needed in creating the optimal post-processing workflow.

And for good measure, here’s a clip from the film that won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Film Editing.