At the start of video editing, the work is exciting because every time you edit you can spot the obvious stuff you can change. The cuts can be more streamlined, shots start to match better and simple sequences start to fit. Eventually, you start getting weird edits. You keep editing, but you no longer think the edits are that better. Your cuts are taking more time to land, everything looks correct but nothing really looks good. This is not a sign that you are done learning. Usually this means your skills are not quite as good as your critical eye. This is actually good. It means you have higher standards, you now need to be more intentional.
The easiest way to break through is to stop editing for a bit and start focusing on smaller tasks. When you feel bad editing, find the thing that is bad: it’s a bad pacing, a bad choice in what comes after or what comes before, a shot that is not cut quickly enough. Edit the same short sequence three times, each one focusing on one specific thing. In the first edit, adjust only shot duration, in the second one keep the duration similar but change the shot order of two or three clips, in the third one remove anything that feels explanatory or repetitive. That way you see how changes in pacing, the order in which something happens, or the amount of information shown can make the entire sequence work.
When we are getting worse at editing, we tend to add more elements too soon and try to make everything fancy. Instead we need to find something wrong about your pacing, and just make the cut simpler. If the same cut feels boring with sound off and no extra effects added, there is something wrong with the cut itself. You probably don’t want to be editing more, so go and take a look at your cut again. Look at the timing of the scene without any extra effects to see if that’s where you are wasting attention, if there are too many shots of something moving the same, or if something feels like a wasted beat. You make things clearer, not more complicated.
When editing is frustrating, you usually want to edit in the short bursts. Pick one thing to focus on and edit for 15 minutes. For five minutes, mark every moment in a short clip where the real action begins, for five more minutes edit as fast and accurate to those times without making it confusing. The last five minutes you watch the sequence twice and write a few notes about where energy rises or drops. It’s easy to get into bad habits without noticing or to edit just to edit, this forces the skill building to be the goal, not just editing to edit.
It is also helpful to edit an older cut with the new skills you have. You will likely see a lot of ways where you edited slower in the original or repeated angles unnecessarily, and if you had to wait for something to come into frame, you could probably edit better. The progress is not that noticeable when you are editing every day, it is a lot more noticeable when you can compare it to something a few weeks back. Editing older content can also be a good way to remind yourself of how much better your critical eye is. The editing may be just as good, the cut just not as good as the original.
Editing plateaus don’t have to be intimidating, once you realize where they can happen. They aren’t where you stop learning to do nothing, they are when your expectations outpace your skill. The solution is not to edit more, but to edit in shorter, deliberate bursts so each problem is clear. A video project is a good teacher if you let it.
