Film Editor

What is a film editor?

The film editor is the head of the picture editorial department and one of the key creative roles on a film crew. Everything the production shoots, often dozens of hours for a two-hour feature, lands with the editor, who decides which fractions of it survive and in what order.

Editors like to call the cut the final rewrite of the script. Scenes get moved, merged or dropped, a line can move from one character's close-up to another's reaction, and a subplot that read well on the page can vanish because the film plays better without it. The craft itself, where shots start and end and what follows them, is covered in the film editing hub. This page is about the person and the job.

What does a film editor do, step by step?

The job follows the film from the first shooting day to delivery:

1. Dailies. Every day's footage is synced and logged, and the editor watches all of it in the dailies, noting the best readings and flagging soft focus, missing angles or continuity gaps while the set can still reshoot.
2. Assembly. During the shoot the editor cuts scenes as they come in, usually close to the script. A week or two after wrap, the full assembly exists. It is often far too long, and that is expected.
3. Editor's cut and director's cut. The editor delivers their own version, then the director joins full time. Under the DGA agreement in the US, feature directors get a protected period, at least ten weeks, to shape their cut.
4. Rough cut to fine cut. Scenes are trimmed, reordered and tightened, with temp music and temp sound effects so the film can be judged as a whole.
5. Screenings and notes. Producers, the studio and often a test screening audience see the film. The editor turns their notes into changes without losing the director's intent.
6. Picture lock and turnover. Once the cut is locked, editorial hands exact edit lists and media to sound, music, VFX and color, the rest of post-production.

The decisions that make the cut

Most of an editor's choices fall into three kinds.

Performance. Across ten takes an actor may land the first half of a line in take 3 and the second half in take 7. The editor builds the performance the audience believes, sometimes from pieces of several takes, and chooses when to stay on the speaker and when the listener's reaction tells more.

Rhythm. How long a shot holds, where a cut lands against a movement or a breath, and when dialogue overlaps the next image all set the pulse of a scene. A cut two frames late can make a joke fall flat.

Structure. The editor decides what the audience knows and when: which scene opens the film, where information arrives, what can be left out.

Walter Murch, who edited picture and sound on Apocalypse Now (1979), ranked the criteria for a cut in In the Blink of an Eye: emotion first, then story, rhythm, eye trace, and the two- and three-dimensional continuity of the screen. When they conflict, keep the emotion and sacrifice the rest.

Who a film editor works with

The closest partnership is with the film director. Many directors keep the same editor for decades: Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, Steven Spielberg and Michael Kahn, Quentin Tarantino and Sally Menke through Inglourious Basterds (2009). The editor is often the one person in the room with fresh eyes, since they never saw how hard a shot was to get.

Beyond the director, the editor relies on the script supervisor's notes (which take was printed, where the actor's hand was), talks to the DP about coverage during the shoot, and hands the locked cut to the sound designers, composer, VFX team and colorist. Producers and the studio give notes; who has the last word is set by contract, which is why some films later get a director's cut.

FlashBoards fits the planning side of this relationship: put the storyboard frames, reference stills and scene cards for each sequence on one board, and keep the editor's notes from dailies beside the frames they concern, so structure changes can be sketched on the canvas before anyone touches the timeline.

Film editor vs. assistant editor

On any production bigger than a short, the editor leads a small team. The assistant editors handle the technical side: ingesting and backing up media, syncing sound, organizing bins by scene and take, preparing temp sound and music, building versions for screenings, and preparing the turnover lists that sound, VFX and color depend on.

The film editor makes the creative calls: which take, where the cut falls, what the scene is about. The line blurs in practice. Assistants often cut scenes or temp VFX, and the assistant chair is still the main road to the editor's chair.

How to become a film editor

There is no licence, but there is a craft ladder. Most feature editors start as assistant editors, or cut shorts, music videos, trailers and documentaries until they build a reel. Learn the standard tools: Avid Media Composer still dominates studio features and series, while Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro are common on independents and commercials.

The real skills are harder to list: a sense of timing, taste in performance, patience for hundreds of versions, and the diplomacy to keep a director's trust while telling them a favorite scene has to go. In the US, many editors join the Motion Picture Editors Guild, and the letters ACE after a name mark membership in American Cinema Editors, an honorary society.

Further reading

Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye (Silman-James Press). Ken Dancyger, The Technique of Film and Video Editing (Routledge).