The 10 questions everyone asks a New York film editor

You're cutting on action instead of intention. Enter scenes late, leave early, and kill every beat the audience already understood — pace is information rate, not clip length.

Assembly first with everything in, no music, no polish. Watch it once cold, write down where you got bored, and fix ONLY structure before touching a single frame of finesse. Music too early hides broken bones.

Avid for scripted post houses and union features, Premiere for the doc/branded/agency world, Resolve if you also want color income. Learn one deep; the second takes a weekend once you think in cuts.

Freelance indie: $300–$600/day; branded and agency $500–$900; assistant editors $250–$400. Shorts often flat-rate $1k–$4k. Charge for revisions past round two — scope creep is the editor's tax.

Assembly, rough, fine, picture lock — realistically 4–8 passes over 3–6 weeks part-time. If you're on version 23, the problem is the script or the director's indecision, and that's a conversation, not a cut.

Cut on the listener, not the speaker: reactions carry the scene's meaning. Overlap audio (J and L cuts) so the rhythm never squares up, and let the best performance decide the shot, not the coverage order.

After structure locks. Temp too early anesthetizes bad scenes, and temp love kills composers later. When you do temp, pull from soundtracks in your film's exact register — not from your favorite playlist.

Recut things: trailers for existing films, a friend's abandoned short, doc footage nobody assembled. Three before/after case studies beat a resume — editors get hired on evidence of judgment, and judgment shows in what you removed.

Translate every note into the problem behind it: "make it faster" usually means "I'm confused here". Address the problem, not the literal instruction, and protect one thing per cut that you know is working.

Shorter than you think: 8–12 minutes is the festival sweet spot, under 8 for comedy. Every minute past 15 halves your programming odds — if a scene doesn't change someone's want, it's already cut.