Cut!

This sums up the madness and obsession of film editing

I remember my college days sitting for forty hours at a Steenbeck cutting and splicing a five minute short, getting to know every frame intimately. Today the same short would probably take a quarter of the time to edit, but I think I would know the project half as well. There’s something about the tactile act of physically cutting film by hand and splicing it with tape that makes one appreciate their own work as well as the work of master editors and directors.

Nowadays it is so easy to edit video digitally on their home computer, that nearly everyone can do it. An entire generation of filmmakers has never actually “cut” film.

But don’t think good editing is not still an art. Editing is where the story comes together and takes a certain level of experience and expertise to take the most jumbled of raw footage, and turn it into a concise and powerful video. Professional editors not only use the best practices and technology, but they also use years of experience solving problems, shaping story, and most importantly, following the technological changes. They also know how to create graphics and polish audio — integral to creating professional looking and sounding video. They know how to compress video for the web just enough to make it load quickly without losing quality. It might take“do-it-yourself” home editor hours to read printed manuals and scan online help forums; only to end up no better than when they started. When you have a deadline, time can’t be wasted finding answers. That’s why the editors at Skillman Video Group keep up-to-date and well practiced in the latest editing techniques and usually can end up editing the project in a fraction of the time as a novice, and with far superior results!

Save iMovie for your home videos.