There are a plethora of resources everywhere to teach you how to be an editor. There’s training websites like Lynda.com and Creative Cow. You can buy assorted training books at some coffeehouse-bookstore hybrid, where some homely fellow is likely playing new age music on a grand piano for Ramen noodle money. You could even go as far as to attend a terrible, terrible place called film school… But I laugh at you for doing these things. Laugh right in your pathetic face! You know why? Because I’m an elitist. I am better than you.

I eat dinner with 12 different solid gold forks. I have have different solid gold forks for different areas of the $800 steaks I eat. I only drink the first sip of a glass of $6000 wine, because I’m only satisfied with the first sip of a full glass of expensive wine. Then I throw the rest of the glass away and request a new drink just so I can take the first sip again. It typically costs me $150,000 to get drunk. What?! You’d like the rest of the glass?! How dare you! I would never allow someone who learned editing at film school to have my unused wine. I would rather destroy an entire wine field than give it to you, which is something I normally do once a month anyway, just for the sport of it.

I’d apologize to you for such a berating of your character, but my servant is currently cleaning the wheels of my Lexus with a toothbrush, and I normally have him apologize to commoners. But the reason I yell at you is because I love you, we are fellow editors, we are required to love each other by United States law. And I don’t want another tedious lawsuit on my hands. I just wanted to let you know that everything you know about editing is wrong.

I’m about to retire, so I’ll let you in on my biggest industry secret, since I have nothing to lose. There is an unimaginable resource located in the nether regions of the internet FULL of brilliant ideas by brilliant people. I take these ideas, and compile them into the greatest workable resource known to post production. So sit back and enjoy infinite knowledge! All you have to do is type in www.youtube.com.

Continuity –

How do you recreate a classic train scene from A Hard Day’s Night with just two teenage girls? No, no, no, the correct answer isn’t “why bother attempting it?”, the correct answer is to slightly juggle locations in their seats and use plenty of name-tags for clarity. I’d like you to show me one person on this entire planet who doesn’t understand what’s going on in this scene. You won’t find anyone, I guarantee it.

Filters –

Brightening techniques and color correction are essential for fine tuning your final videos. Often times people will let their videos become too dark to see what’s actually happening clearly. But with plug-ins and filters, these ghost hunters truly show us how captivating an image can be portrayed on video in it’s highest possible clarity. I didn’t know there was an FCP plug-in for finding ghouls! I’ve got the chills!

And in this next thrilling video, we take a look at how proper color correction can accurately show how your backyard is actually on the bottom of the ocean. Living under the sea is fantastic. I have several underwater mansions, but this one is pretty good. He captured the feel very well.

Sound Effects –
Being a twelve time winner of the Academy Award for Achievement in Sound Effects Editing has its benefits. Let’s just say that not one, but TWO local restaurants have named ham sandwiches after me. Well, it was two, but one of them got shut down for unsanitary conditions. And the other one burnt down mysteriously two winters ago. But still, people often ask me two things about my brilliant sound effects work;

1. “I didn’t know they gave out awards for that, how long have they been doing that?”
After I hear this I usually ask the peon what they do for a living, then purchase the company they work for and fire that person.

2. “Where did you learn how to do that, oh mighty overlord?”
Well, that answer is simple. Cat videos. Obviously.

Mind Blowing Graphics -

Did you see that??? This show must cost $50 million to produce, they just blow through intense visual effects like they are nothing, simply because they know they can! They have what appears to be a virtual ladybug crawl across the screen! I’m not 100% sure if it was fake, I’ll have to do frame-by-frame, but that was borderline brain melting! I’d like to see the render bar on that intense composition…! Weta Digital better watch their back, because these girls are only 10 years old, imagine the future potential…! I’ll have to e-mail them on which program they used because I am SO getting that. Though, it was a little hard to listen to the content because my eyes were being dazzled beyond belief, but I’m sure Jenna and Kristi had a show full of rich social commentary and thoughts on how to improve the American economy.

Here’s an even better example of blowing your mind, using the Michael Bay theory. As we all know, Michael Bay is the greatest and richest filmmaker in the world. His winning formula = Explosions. Lots and lots of explosions. Though, no one is better at explosions than the one and only DR. EXPLOSION!! He has a PhD in explosions!! From Dynamite University!!

While we’re on the subject of Dr. Explosion, he also teaches us two other great post production tips that we should always abide by no matter what;

1. Always make the credits to your video nearly three times as long as the actual story. You can never give yourself enough credit.

2. If the credits song is too lengthy for the 5 lines of text you had planned, just play the song out over black so people can keep listening to it until its over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used the first 30 seconds of “Stairway to Heaven” for a credits sequence, then just played the remaining seven and a half minutes out over black. It just works.

Pacing –
Pacing is very important when it comes to editing. Perhaps the most important. Observe how well this patriotic spy thriller flows from scene to scene, keeping us guessing what our duster-clad hero (or villain…?) will do next. I felt this got snubbed at the Golden Globes. Behold the intensity of Subversion Interface! It hack.exe’d right into my soul.

Stunning Action Scenes –
I saw the new Star Trek film, and to be honest, I was very underwhelmed. I’m not sure, it just seemed like the overall look of the film was, what’s the right word…? Ah yes, amateurish. I laughed out loud in my private theater at some of the action scenes in that film, but that was only because I saw this much more intense video the night before:

Greenscreen Technology -
Everyone knows that green screen technology was invented sometime around 1875 (prove me wrong; historical records of that era are shotty at best), but not until recently has the technology surpassed what the human mind is actually capable of comprehending. I often find myself wondering not only how these people are able to blend in so well to their environments, but also are they even using green screens at all?? That’s how good they look!

I don’t know how they do it, they captured the mood perfectly, I mean they are dancing so intensely that they are literally disintegrating! What a stunning visual effect! They should do a tutorial on how to do this human vaporizing.

This young, female soon-to-be George Lucas did a spectacular job keying around the green blob on the right side of the screen. I would think it would be hard to key around a green blob against a green screen, but she must have spent all night on it. I bet she has an advanced copy of the next version of Keylight. I probably would have ended up just keying the green blob out, but she apparently has the skills to key around it. I know when I am bested. Kudos.

Word of advice, if you’re going to use super powers on camera like this, you should probably hide your identity with a costume, I mean you don’t want any super-villains to know who… wait, what?! This is FAKE??

Why We Post -

People often forget about the most important part about a video. The message. There is no point in doing any editing tricks at all if the overall message of the video isn’t worthwhile. The main point of putting a video out there to the public is to show the world that your video is the best. Every video that goes out there should never have the intention of wasting anyone’s time. I mean we all shoot video of our daily lives, little “ha ha” moments that occur to us, but we save those videos in our personal homes in order to watch them amongst friends and family, remembering the good times, sharing fun memories.

SURELY, no one would ever post a video on YouTube, one of the most popular websites in history, if the message of the video wasn’t important. Surely, every video doesn’t need to be uploaded for the world to watch, only the important ones. The one’s with real stories to tell. Messages to convey.

You see, now everybody knows how awesome Trevor and Sedore are. Thanks Coady! I’m sure their antics will land them an ABC Family sitcom in no time, thanks for getting their big video out there for the world to see. This won’t waste anybody’s time, as it did nothing but enrich my life.

Ah yes, Devon, have you consulted the Guinness World Record people on your amazing jump yet? I felt riveted the entire time I was watching, the element of danger was enthralling. Thank you for uploading this, it didn’t waste my time at all, it actually gave me a shot of adrenaline to the heart!

Thank you so much for uploading this for everyone to see. Now I know what true love really is. I hope the story you were trying to convey in this video poem of love, that you wanted complete strangers to see on the internet, gets you all the credit in the world for being the opposite of a waste of time.

Oh.  Oh, sorry.  That one was actually a waste of time…

The Ultimate in YouTube Video!
I’m not sure why I didn’t just show you this from the beginning. Just follow the formulas of this next video and you too can become the next Winston Randall Montgomery IV. Though I probably would have thrown a fish eye effect in there, maybe some inverted sepia color effects too, but I guess that’s what separates a super rich successful editor like myself from the 15 year old girls.

The SuiteTake -

***Author’s Note: In an effort to not sound too mean-spirited regarding this entire post, I used to make movies 5x worse than any of these back in junior high/high school. Everybody starts somewhere, and usually it sucks. I actually commend YouTube on it’s spirit. And its “When Animals Attack” videos. Those are just hilarious. So to be fair, I’ll upload a video of mine on YouTube from 7 years ago, that is as “awesome” as anything in this post (and I made it in iMovie…!).

Ah, the words of Dave Coulier have never resonated stronger in my life than in recent days. Sure there were times on the playground in 4th grade when Full House lingo may have been more frequent, but not until I started editing did I consider Uncle Joey’s catch phrase to become a way of life. In a situation where a nice After Effects sequence or a Motion graphic project could jazz up a portion of a video that needs a little jazzing, I look to my go-to secondary editing program: Photoshop.

You could say that I’m not skilled enough in After Effects and Motion to utilize them enough so I resort to Photoshop. Well, that would be mean to say, and you know what, I think your shirt is ugly and you have poor taste in restaurants. I like to think that I use Photoshop in a good enough way that it could be the program I look to for sprucing things up, just by cutting up and rebuilding photos. So despite what my Dad insists, Photoshop can be used for more than eliminating red eye in pictures of his dog.

What I mean by cutting up and rebuilding photos is exactly what it sounds like. Bust out the lasso tool, and cut out multiple objects in the foreground of the shot, make them their own individual images, then build them back together like a puzzle. In certain situations where you need just a little extra spark in a video that is supposed to be a little more lively than the untouched footage has the capabilities of, cutting things out of images can be a cheap and easy way to do so. I know this is nothing new to anyone, it’s not like I invented the equivalent of Goober PB&J sandwich spread, but I think it works for brief moments where, again, you need something more than a dissolve to a panning photo. Some people think it looks cool, you may not think the same, and in that case, I think your shoes are stupid, so there. At the very least it is more interesting than dissolves and zooms.

Here’s an example; I needed a moderately flashy opening for this video about this dude, and I had a bunch of shots of him playing instruments, so I thought I would take a still image from the video of him playing the drums, and isolate them, and make him fly onto the drum set over a background.

So I took the first frame of the shot I was planning on playing out after the photo work, and I cut out the drums with a combination of a bunch of the select/cutting out tools, mainly the polygonal lasso tool. It takes a little time to get it to look pretty good, as a rushed job would look pretty noticeable I suppose, so just zoom in real close and trace around the drum set. I love doing this kinda stuff, when I was a kid I loved to draw, and I would draw all the time, but the only thing was that I was a horrible artist. So for my birthday one year, probably in an act of sympathy for my lack of artistic talent, my mom bought me a big notebook of tracing paper. I loved it, as it made me appear as if I knew how to draw. All it really did was raise my childhood self esteem by doing a quasi-talent (kind of like being good at Guitar Hero, but terrible at actual guitar). Anyway, the same fun principal applies here, just trace around the drums until you’ve got a good outline, and shift-drag it onto a transparent document of the same size.

Well now there is a cut out of the drums on the guy’s body, because obviously this isn’t an x-ray camera that can magically see through the drums and fill in the body. But cut out the guy’s body from the background anyway, shift-drag him to a different transparent document of the same size, and start filling in the gaps with the clone stamp and paint tools. It will look crappy most likely unless you are the Picasso of computer painting, but in this case it doesn’t matter because I’m going to have him fly across the screen in roughly one second of duration, so no one will really be watching for it.

So then in Final Cut, put both of the isolated transparent images in the timeline with the back end of it right before the actual start of the moving video (which should be starting with the same frame as the stills).

Then put a center keyframe at the back end of the guy’s image, and go to where you want him to come in, and pull him off screen. Now he will fly from off screen and settle in on the drum set. Put a little move on the front of the drum set and you’ve got yourself a neat little movement going on. It’s actually pretty easy. [you can look at the video after next example]

Later in the video I was told I needed to make a file cabinet do something cool. A file cabinet?! Alright. Same concept as the drums, take the first frame of where you want the moving video to start, make it an image, and start cutting away! Trace around the files in the file cabinet and make them all their own individual transparent images of the same size.

Now once again the image that had stuff covering it in the foreground (the cabinet sides) has some transparent gaps in it, so use clone stamp and paint and blur and whatever else you need to to get it to look like it is it’s own object that didn’t have anything on it to begin with. I put in a large black abyss on the right because I thought it worked.

Then again in the FCP, put all the layers down on top of each other (with the cabinet structure on the bottom) and build on the files themselves as you see fit, and when it’s lined up correctly with the start of the video, it will seem like your still image has COME ALIVE…! It’s an easy effect, and it makes a file cabinet look more interesting than just transitioning the shot onto the screen

In this excerpt from this other video, you can also build on pictures while they’re moving by cutting out the foreground objects that you want to build on, then put them all in on top of each other where you want them in the timeline. Then disable the foreground layers, and put whatever move you’d like on the bottom layer (which is the full uncut picture), then enable the other layers and copy the keyframes from the one you put the moves on to the foreground layers. Then cut them at the front of the clips where you want them to build on. (Also, I didn’t pick this song, I don’t even know who the artist is, and it got changed to a Michael Jackson song in the end, but I like the timing better on this song for certain areas [like the ones I'm showing you here]. But yeah, just saying, I listen to Lou Reed and The Clash, just trying to save my musical credibility…)

Then in this last example, I just cut out a bunch of photos for this highlight video into three layers each, and just mashed them together into a sequence. I tried to get the photos to play off of each other when I could, and have them flow to a degree. My initial idea (which may or may not have come true) was to achieve “a subtle Ken Burns effect on cocaine”. It’s very simple in execution, by just building on the layers one at a time until the full picture is revealed, then putting a move on the full picture.

I thought it looked cool in the end. I was going for “wacky” so I sort of went insane with the transitions, but you could tone it down if you wanted to do so, I don’t see why you couldn’t, it’s a free country for the most part. So, I just timed it all to an awesome song by The Cars, and in my opinion it is better than just Ken Burnsing the photos into a sequence. It might be too unsubtle for some people’s tastes, but it could work however you want it to work. And again, it really isn’t that hard to do any of this, you just need to have the time to cut the pictures out. And for this particular project, as the Stones would say “Time is on my side… yes it is!”

The SuiteTake

This is not a new concept to anyone, but perhaps you can do a variation of this to solve a problem of how to make a still image a little different in a video where you need something a little different. Maybe my examples aren’t your cup o’ tea, but I remember two things from my vacation to Disney World in the 2nd grade. I got to meet April O’Neal from the Ninja Turtles (whom I had a crush on at the time), and I also remembered the words of Dr. Dreamfinder and his pet dragon Figment, “Imagination is our key to unlock the hidden wonders of our world.” So maybe you can come up with something better yourself! (by the way, have you noticed how Disney hasn’t exactly been pushing the imagination theory on kids nowadays, like they did with my generation in the late 80s/early 90s? Every kid I see lately is a mindless dullard…)

And if you don’t like the effect at all, then well, I think you’re singing talent is mediocre and you have a less than satisfactory body odor.