14.05.2020

What does a video editor do?

This article is part of a four-piece series that describes the different jobs of the people working on the MAVM project. In this particular entry, we explain why video editors play such a crucial role in the digitisation process and how they use their skills to preserve our audiovisual heritage.

After footage from physical media has been ingested and converted into digital format, this is then imported by video editors onto their workstations for the second step of the digitisation process. At this stage, video editors split up the ingested footage (called rushes) into shorter clips about a particular subject or which comprise a segment from a longer feature.

Video editors must pay particular attention to trim the footage into clips which may then be joined together into a cohesive and meaningful video. The first attempt at creating such an edit is called a rough cut; this is subsequently refined to produce a final cut, which is the finished version of the product.

Video editors use specialised software and plugins to improve the appearance of old audiovisual material by digitally removing scratches and blank frames, as well as enhancing the quality of the image by correcting its brightness, contrast and colour balance. 

In this article, we explained what the job of the video editors working on the MAVM project involves. Our team also depends on the talents of other professionals, who ensure the archives digitisation process goes smoothly, namely: audio editors, metadata editors, and ingest operators. Follow the links to learn more about these roles.