Conferences for Video Editors — Should You Attend?

July 10, 2020September 24, 2014 by Josh Short

Conference floor — Determining whether or not to attend a conference can be tricky.
Photo by Kounosu on Wikipedia Commons

This article focuses on conferences for video editors and determining when you should or should not attend.

Oh, conferences. You are a surefire way to get out of the office for a day (or more) in order to eat mediocre at best mass-produced finger food while trying to impress everyone around you even though they are all speaking in their own jargon that they don’t even understand.

Oh, conferences. You can cost a fortune and give me zero value in return or you don’t have to cost that much and I make a connection that’ll change my life.

Oh, conferences. How will I ever know which of the conferences for video editors to attend?

Hi. I’m Josh, your friendly neighborhood video editor here to open up and give you my thoughts on the answer. I’ve been to my fair share of conferences, both in industry and out of industry. I’ve been to enough to know the factors that should determine if you should attend that conference. Let’s jump into them!

Yes, you must attend.

There are two factors that can invoke an automatic “yes, you must attend” response for all conferences for video editors.

First, is your company paying for it? If that is a yes, there really isn’t much of a reason not to go. Any chance you get to build your skills and network while someone else pays for it, you better go.

What’s working for me in post right now

July 17, 2019August 20, 2014 by Josh Short

Today I decided to take a step back and look at what’s been going right for me in post production lately. I gathered some hardware essentials, software tips, productivity hacks and more for you in this post. After reading it this make sure to tell me what is working for you right now in post production. The first thing that’s working for me is literally by my side all day, everyday.

Fantom Drives

I absolutely love these external hard drives. I’ve used them for the past five years. I got introduced to Fantom Drives when my old production manager started buying their GreenDrives for deep storage of projects and shipping media to remote freelance editors when shop got too busy.

My Fantom Drive G-Force3. I have six of them.

Tell, Tell and Told – How I (accidentally) improved quality in production and post

May 27, 2020August 13, 2014 by Josh Short

Still trying to figure out what to write as a caption for this picture. If you think of one, tell me in the comments section.
Photo by Jay Mantri

Last week I had a three-day shoot in New York City. It’s been a few months since I’ve shot anything of substance on a location and I could feel my “cameraman muscle” atrophying. During the shoot I did something I’ve been doing outside of shooting entirely on accident. Afterwards I realized I improved the quality of the video, lessened time spent in post and made the client happier.

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time writing posts and editing videos rather than shooting. An approach to writing, and content creation in general, is the Tell, Tell and Told method. I’m going to go over with you what it is, how I used it on my shoot and where it fits in in post production.

Honestly I have no idea what this is actually called. Someone help me out in the comments section if you know!

Tell, Tell and Told – Explain this, please.

Tell, Tell and Told is simple – tell the audience what you will tell them, tell it to them and then tell them what you told them.

Tell the audience what you will tell them is the basic introduction. I did this above when I said “I’m going to go over with you what it is, how I…” Tell it to them is what we’re doing now. I’m telling you the information I want to give you in the post. Tell them what you told them is a recap. Ex: Today we went over how to change point text to paragraph text in After Effects.

You should do this in any sort of informative product (written, video, other). Think about most of the non-fiction programming you watch. There’s a short introduction that says what’s going to happen in the show. That introduction teases something big that you always have to wait until the last 5 minutes to see. Then the meat of the show happens. Finally there’s a recap of everything that was covered in the last 45 seconds that the editor squeezed in before the credits get squished over to the side to show the start of the next show.

The Shoot

Day 1 of my shoot was wrapping. We had a solid non-talent talent and were actually done early. This was an amazing feeling after getting up at 3:45am to catch a train to NYC. But since we had some more time, and despite of some sleep deprivation, I decided to stop everyone from packing up and leaving when we thought we got everything done on the shot list. Together I guided us through everything we shot and our notes. This turned out to be tremendously helpful.

We realized that 1) we skipped a shot 2) two of our notes were wrong and 3) we should shoot these couple quick items that weren’t on the list.

An Editor’s Biggest Struggle

July 17, 2019August 8, 2014 by Josh Short

Procrastination. In the first few months of this website I’m trying to publish at least once a week, preferably every Wednesday. This past week I had a shoot out of town Monday-Wednesday. I knew I had a (self-imposed) deadline to hit but procrastinated the days before the trip and ended up not getting a post written. I waited to take action until it was too late.

The same happens in the edit bay. We get an important, large project or task but hold off on it until it is too late. We end up rushing or put it together 5 minutes at a time alternating with 5 minutes of Facebook. Sometimes you just have to stop everything and focus on the most important task at hand.

This morning I could have easily held off writing this post until Monday. But once I took a step back from my day and looked at everything I was doing (messing around on Twitter, taking a class on Lynda, debating about going to the dog park) I realized this post is the most important thing for me to do. So I stopped what I was doing, which was learning Japanese (we can talk about that in a different post!), put on my favorite song of the moment, opened up Word and started typing.

Parkinson’s Law states that, “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” If we are given three weeks to complete a project we’re usually going to wait until there’s five days left to start on it. Instead of looking at three weeks to complete a project why not break down all the steps – import, log, string out, etc. – and give yourself mini deadlines.

Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

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I’m actually in this scenario right now. I have about three weeks to complete editing my most recent shoot. I know I could crank it out in five days, but it wouldn’t be my best work and I’d be super stressed. Instead I’m breaking it down into these mini deadlines. Yesterday’s goal was to get everything imported. Today it’s to organize all my shots and go through my notes (I haven’t done it yet but have a couple hours blocked off later this afternoon!).