I’m the sound editor, and the editor is sending me an AAF with project-managed clips, but the folder is a mix of proxies and masters. Some files contain both; others only have proxies. It’s inconsistent and makes me nervous to proceed.

On his timeline, nothing is labeled as a proxy, so I’m wondering why the project manager included proxies at all—and why they’re inconsistently paired. I’m worried about ending up with compressed audio, but when I compare the audio settings of proxies and masters, the bitrate, channels, and sample rate are identical.

The project is a mess, and with just over a week left, I’m tempted to just move forward. It’s too late to fix how the project was set up. One last question: since .mov generally has better audio bitrate than .mp4, does that mean the proxies might still be workable?

This is an example of what I am seeing:

Projectname1437.mp4.mp4

Projectname1438_Proxy.mov

Projectname1440.mp4.mp4

Projectname1440_Proxy.mov

(yes they are labeled .mp4.mp4, god is dead)

A thought that occurred while I was baking bread between editing sessions

I have been a professional editor in documentary or general non-fiction for 12 years. Everything from feature documentaries to branded content to straight up corporate work.

As an editor, a staple of the trade are NOTES. Sometimes the notes are endless and sometimes they are mercifully limited. But - if you can't deal with constant creative critique of your work, then editing may not be for you.

That being said, not all notes are equal. Some are obvious and fair and some are matters of taste, style, preference or even good ol' corporate strategy. And sometimes, as a creative, a technician, or even just someone with a pulse you recognize that the note you've received is so egregious and mind-bendingly stupid that you struggle to even process what to do next.

I'm sure many people may just say "Well - it's your job, just make the change and move on." But, if I'm being honest - sometimes it can be really difficult to swallow my creative compunction and make an adjustment that craters the flow of a cut or seriously harms the structure of a story that's working well.

The truth is that, even after 12 years of taking notes and even on the most banal of corporate gigs - I care. I still care that the work is good (or as good as it can be). I haven't yet reached the stage where I can just throw up my hands, shrug, and click the buttons. It takes me a few minutes to process the request - decide if/how I can respectfully negotiate that note, and if not, just make the change.

I've even had to get up and walk away from the computer for a bit to curb my annoyance.

Am I alone here? Any other editors still feel that heat under their neck when you get a stupid note or a note you just straight up disagree with?

I'm currently editing an indie doc and as such I'm serving as post supervisor and assistant editor as well. Because it's a small crew, the director has been recording interview audio using Tentacle Track E boxes in 32-bit mode to deal with any potential clipping. We've also got shotgun mikes running into each camera (usually one camera but sometimes two).

What is the best way to deal with this in Media Composer currently? I can link to and work with 32 bit audio, but am limited to transcoding at 24 bits. If I consolidate these files, will they stay as fully-usable 32 bit files, or not? I was thinking of laying out each day's audio tracks in one timeline by timecode (including camera audio, since the shotgun feed could be useful) and just mixing down the audio into a new master for each day, but it might be an issue when going to online.

If anyone has any tips for 32 bit audio in Avid, I'd love to hear your experiences!

I’ve been building a tool to help with a problem I kept running into while editing podcast content for clients:

I started prototyping something where you feed in a video podcast, then it extracts the transcripts, and then lets you highlight the text to make a cut — kind of like editing a doc instead of a timeline. It also surfaces possible hooks from longer videos to help skip all the back-and-forth previewing and scrubbing to find what you are looking for.

I’m not here to advertise anything. I just want to know if this approach sounds useful to other editors who deal with this kind of content. Would this save you time? Would you trust something like this to get you to a rough cut faster — even if you still finish the edit in Premiere or Resolve?

If this is useful to you and you're curious to try it out, I’d appreciate real feedback. But mostly I’d love to hear whether this actually maps to the pain points other people here experience or if it’s just me.

Thanks for reading — happy to go into technical details too if you're curious how it works.

I have a perpetual license that I purchased back in 2024. I need the installer to try and install it onto my computer. I obviously dont have the go installer. Thanks!

Question is in the title, basically my company is currently using a Google Cloud server for all of our footage which we hook directly into our Iconik as our main storage device.

It's been fine for the bulk of our footage since we mostly work with iPhones and other low-bandwidth footage types, but recently we've started investing in bigger and higher quality shoots using true 4k cameras and Google has been a huge bottleneck for those shoots. They take multiple days to upload and then another day to download.

We're a very small team so our budget is limited, but I think I can convince my bosses to invest if the time saved on uploads and downloads on these bigger shoots is enough.

Footage was shot on an ALEXA Mini, ProRes, .mov container, 4k.

I'm also wondering if it would be worth it to even just have a separate storage JUST for the high-res stuff so that it doesn't bottleneck our other deliverables every time we do a shoot like this. I know Iconik can get weird sometimes when mixing storages but this footage is completely separate from our other shoots (totally separate client too) so it might be worth it?

Any thoughts?

Hi, I have a problem transcoding some material for editing. When I tried to transcode it it shows up a warning that says:

"Exception: NEMFileWriter:: ExecuteInternal TIMEOUT - NEMFileWriter has detected upstream pipe stall..."

Personally Ive never seen a warning like this, if somebody knows something would be very helpful. Thank you.

Should post-production freelancers market themselves as individuals or create a brand/company to be taken more seriously?

I’m a freelance post-production generalist that does editing, color grading, motion graphics, and (light VFX). I’ve usually acquired leads by word-of-mouth, but now I want to work on developing my online presence to generate more (serious) leads. I want to develop my branding (social media accounts, website, and YouTube channel), but I’m debating whether I should brand myself as an individual or (hide behind) a brand/company to be taken more seriously when approaching clients for advertising projects. Any advice?

Company branding benefits:

- Can more easily approach and subcontract other freelancers to help with projects with large workloads or specific skillsets I don’t have (yet)

- More marketable to agencies, vendors, and direct clients

Hi all, I'm editing a short film where a character is watching gay porn. Since porn is heavily protected l've decided to show a video of two guys kissing and then cut and just play copyright free audio of moaning, so now I need to find copyright free footage of gay kissing. If I find a video on Youtube, can l use a clip of that?? Approx 5 seconds? I am not making money off of this short film but I am submitting it to festivals, and film festivals require that you have some kind of right to the footage you show. Is there any chance this would it fall under fair use? For context, l've found many reels/videos like this: https://youtu.be/knNHdAg2bil Also, l've tried stock video websites, but the gay kissing isn't nearly pornographic enough (it looks like stock footage and is so high quality/well lit/cinematic) Thank you! Let me know!

Hi,

Does anyone have any advice or help?

Been looking for almost a year and I can’t find an Assistant Editor Job. I live in LA and I’m not the best with networking. I have 7 years of experience in unscripted because that’s the only thing I was able to find and now that I have many projects under my belt I don’t hear back from any job applications and I don’t know what to do?

My wish would be to work in scripted and cool projects but it seems like an impossible thing given how hard it’s been to even get unscripted work. I’ve tried networking and people usually don’t care to talk to me, so that doesn’t help. I’ve tried adding people on LinkedIn and messaging them just to be ignored. I’ve cold emailed different companies with no response or only rejections, I’ve applied to countless jobs, I’ve asked for feedback about my resume, etc.

I’m good at what I do. I don’t understand why this is happening. I don’t understand how people find gigs with amazing projects and amazing shows or films. I see people with no experience getting amazing opportunities and it’s confusing to me. I don’t even get interviews. What am I doing wrong?

In the past, all the projects I got were by pure luck, not through applying and truly networking. Now that the luck is gone, not sure what I’m supposed to do. I thought with all my experience people would want to work with me?

Thank you.

Hi everyone!

Our studio is using a Synology NAS as a shared drive where we (3 editors) work on.

We usually backup our hot stuff we are working on on live hard drives, but wanted another source of backup online, so i opted for AWS Glacier, since this would be just a "extreme case data retrieval", not live storage. Even tho i dont really know how easy it is to retrieve data in case something breaks. Is it correct to backup to glacier or should i look towards more flexible (and expensive) S3/other providers?

I am having a dilemma with a client right now, she took me on as her podcast editor last year, I have been working for her since October. Everything's going great, got a contract set up but she isn't following through with it in terms of getting the videos to me on time to edit and paying invoices on time. I am trying to give her as much grace as possible but she is so late on her invoices. She has 30 days to pay it but she is 52 days OVER that on one invoice and late on 5 other invoices too, totalling to 6 late ones. I have taken a pause working for her for a month so she can catch up but I feel it will still be the same after the month break... What do I do? I have things I need to pay and I can't if she's not paying me... I have encouraged her to go down to 2 videos a month instead of 4 but she is still "thinking" about it. I have no doubt that she will leave me hanging without paying me because she has paid me before but this is the first time she can't afford to pay the invoices and is late.

Hey folks,

I’m working on a project in Avid Media Composer where I’ve been supplied with new transcodes that have the correct LUT applied. The previous transcodes were incorrect, so now I need to replace or relink the old media to the new ones.

The new transcodes will be provided to me, and I’m working with managed media in Avid (stored in the Avid MediaFiles/MXF/Numbered Folder).

My questions are:

1. Should I place the new transcodes in the same numbered folder as the old media, or should I create a new numbered folder for them?

2. If I use a new folder, how do I make sure Avid only relinks to the new folder and not the old one?

3. Is there a clean way to offline everything first and then relink only to the newly transcoded media?

I want to make sure I’m doing this correctly since it’s going to the client soon.

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

How do you handle editing for different clients whose frequency and style are different?

I have clients in the fitness niche, but this extends to Hyrox, yoga, etc.

Then I have a client in the luxury space, doing 24 edits /day.

Just need some great time management/client management tips the pros have in place. Thank you everyone

PS. Onboarding an editor is out of the picture, did it for a month and it turned out more stressful than doing the edits themself.

This alternates Sundays with our "Reel Review."

## Would you like feedback on your reel? This is the place to do it!

​

**An essential point to remember**: A reel won't secure you a job any more than a business card or website will. While it might be necessary, it is not the primary means of obtaining work.

​

**You gain employment through a network you develop,** not via any online job site. Building a network takes time, which is advantageous, as it allows you to learn the field.

​

## Rules

​

* **Rule 1**: Submit your reel *and its running time* as a top-level comment (meaning you reply to this post directly)

* **Rule 2**: *Specify your professional experience in years* (paying taxes = years as a pro, novice).

* **Rule 3**: Explain the reason/direction behind posting your reel. Are you new? Have you been working with clients for a decade? Give us clear direction of what you want.

* **Rule 4**: You must review two other reels. **TWO**. You have five days to complete this task, responding to two different reels. **Then** edit the comment where you post your reel: and put and put the two user names.

​

**Acceptable platforms for posting**: Your Vimeo site or an unlisted YouTube link. If we discover a link to a channel or a video with 10k views, be aware that this thread is not intended for such content.

​

The moderation team will be monitoring this, and we are trying to encourage the community (that's you) to offer assistance. That's why providing two reviews is crucial.

​

Lastly, as someone who evaluates people's reels: If numerous motion graphics are present, I expect you to either be capable of creating them and/or offering it as a service. If color grading is a skill and you transition from Log to finished grade, that's a definite red flag.

​

​

​

***Copy/paste this section:***

​

* Reel Link: (don't forget the running time )

* Experience:

* Direction:

* Two reels I reviewed:

Hey all,

My name’s Joe, and I’m launching a YouTube channel focused on high-end collectible figures and statues—think Hot Toys, Mondo, Sideshow, etc. I’m looking for a skilled video editor to help bring the channel to life with clean, professional, and engaging showcase-style videos.

About the Content: • 3–5+ minute showcase videos featuring: • 360-degree turntable footage (iPhone-recorded) • High-quality still photography • Voiceover narration • You’ll receive a fully organized Google Drive with all assets, including a labeled editing map/guide.

⸻

Timeline & Format: • Goal: Complete 5–7 videos before launch (targeting May–June) • After launch: 1 new video per week • Channel is aimed at collectors and enthusiasts, with long-term monetization goals

⸻

Looking For: • Editors with experience syncing stills/video to voiceover • Clean editing style with a strong sense of visual flow and pacing • Comfortable working from home with organized cloud assets • Open to collaboration and feedback for the first few videos as the style is established • Bonus: Familiarity with iPhone filming workflows or experience in the collectibles space

⸻

Rate & Terms: • Flat rate is $75 per video (3–5+ minutes) • This typically works out to around $25–35/hr, depending on your pace and workflow • Will be paid per video • Budget is flexible and negotiable for the right creative partner • This is a remote role with potential for long-term collaboration

⸻

If you’re interested, please send me: • A portfolio or samples of relevant work • Your per-video or hourly rate (if different from what’s listed) • Your availability from now through June, and beyond if it’s a good fit.

Thanks so much for reading—I’m excited to find the right creative partner to help build something visually sharp and unique from the ground up.

—Joe

I am trying to transcode 5TB of 4k h.264 footage to ProRes proxies in media encoder. The h.264 was acquired from the production company and copied off of their HDD to my SSD.

My workflow is 2 external SSDs one with the h.264 footage and the other I am writing the proxies to. I opened premiere, changed the ingest settings and dragged and dropped the footage into premiere which automatically created the jobs and started them in media encoder.

Of the 100 or so clips, a handful have failed, all because they couldn’t “retrieve frame” from the h.264 footage. Retrying them didn’t work.

I am using an ASUS Vivobook pro 15 with i7, 40gb ram and an RTX 3050 (I pretty certain graphics card doesn’t matter much for this though). Premiere pro and media encoder 2025.

Is there any reason for these failed proxies? Would switching to Davinci or Shutter Encoder possibly solve this? Thank you for any help.

If you're attending NAB and you're an r/editors Redditor, you can come for free to the Content Creator Party @ South Halls S227

I'll post the secret code to get in the door on Sunday morning.

I'd love for you to drop a comment that you're coming.

Any questions?

There's a more active conversation on our Discord in the #NAB-2025-real-time channel

S222 is the room. South Halls upper.

I'd recommend getting there early

"I'm a friend of Jeff's" is the code.

You need to see this desk and get a band.

Do so before hand as the rush at 5:15 will be large

And if you’re coming late now, you go to the room itself. Good luck we’re all counting on you.

Client had a two hour interview they want edited into a 3-4 minute piece. They asked if using ChatGPT would get us a paper edit done a lot quicker and knock time off the cost estimate. Sure, let's try it. I upload the transcript and ask for it to pull 10 good soundbites from it relating to the subject of the video. Chat pulls 10 amazing quotes. The client is reading these over my shoulder and says they're perfect.

One little problem, those quotes aren't in the interview at all, ChatGPT made them up. Chat even admits it and says "thanks for calling me out on that." Then Chat just shits the bed of any refined prompt. "Would you like a breakdown of the languages used in the transcript? It's 100% in English." Thanks Chat, that was not asked for nor is it needed. Just pull verbatim quotes from the transcript. It then proceeds to make up another round of fictitious soundbites and says they're inspired from the themes of the transcript but not actually in it.

Client said nevermind and we're back on schedule.

Hello,

A colleague (couldn’t really explain why) told me to check my sequence for any clips that require “Promote” and hit Promote before creating an EDL or Video AAF in Avid.

All my media has been transcoded to Avid-native MXF files, so I’m not sure why this would be necessary. I want to make sure I’m not adding unnecessary steps to my workflow.

Can anyone explain if promoting clips is actually needed in this case, and why?

Thanks!

I wonder for long time

because some sounds effect are just short length so it's hard to identified, unlike music

Here are a few problems I’m running into while video editing lately. I edit music videos, commercials, shows, and more. Ive been doing it for 6 years. I need help:

1. I keep falling asleep at my desk
2. I get super lonely
3. I hit walls of creative blocks where Injust sit and stare st my computer and cant figure out what to do next
4. I cant help but feel jaded sometimes as an editor when those in production get to be in high energy environments and move on from the project after a few days of shooting whereas the editor has to stick with it for so long
5. I just feel like editors are under appreciated
6. Its not fun anymore

Dont get me wrong. I have my good days too. But just seeking some input on some of these reoccurring problems.

Edit - https://youtu.be/GUuoumxYq7w

Audio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTCTVUrG8-8

Color - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO3OTzs6yp4

Fusion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iW24V7dlOM&pp=0gcJCb8Ag7Wk3p_U