Outsourcing video editing helps you scale up your content quality and quantity.
Once you no longer have to spend time and headspace on selecting the right cuts and transitions, fine-tuning color grading, or fiddling with VFX, you can focus on what you do best – brainstorming new ideas and filming amazing footage.
But how do you hire great video editors? After all, there are thousands of professionals out there clamoring to take on your projects. How do you decide which one to go with?
Here’s an in-depth guide on how to navigate the field and hire truly great video editors.
Contents
Take Stock of Your Needs and Set Your Priorities
To start with, take some time for reflection and assess your own needs and priorities as a content creator.
Output: What is your current content output, and what is the ideal you’d want to reach with the help of a professional video editor?
Schedule: How do you want your content creation schedule to change when you outsource video editing? What turnaround times will you require from your editor to hit your rhythm? Are you planning to produce content as you go along, or finish it all at once in batches?
Quality and style: What type of edits do you need? Will the complexity of your edits stay the same as it is now? Or do you want your editor to implement more sophisticated effects?
Budget: What are you willing to invest into upgrading your content quality and quantity? And: How much do you think your revenue will increase to offset the spend?
Before starting to look to hire great video editors, you should step back and think about all these questions. Having the answers straight in your mind is a big help during the selection process.
Crucially, you should also get your priorities straight before you start looking at candidates.
Are you willing to compromise on turnaround times if it means you get a highly skilled freelancer who’s specialized in your niche? Or would you prefer someone with solid, less focused skills but who can keep up with the content creation pace you’re aiming for?
Decide on Freelancers vs. Video Editing Services
Once you’ve assessed your needs and your priorities, the first major choice you’ll have to make when hiring great video editors is whether you want to go for a freelancer or a professional video editing service.
Freelancers
The options for hiring freelance video editors online are myriad – from specialized job boards over LinkedIn to gig platforms like Upwork and Fiver. Many freelancers are highly skilled and passionate about their craft. They’re happy to work with clients and attune to their individual voices.
That said, there are two major downsides to hiring freelancers.
The first is that it’s hard to assess their skills. While platforms like Upwork do provide client ratings, hiring a freelance editor from a job board or via LinkedIn will require you to do some serious vetting and a few interviews before you find a suitable candidate.
The second big downside of working with a freelance video editor is that they are just a single person, with natural limitations. They only have a so many working hours in their day and may be juggling multiple clients at a time. Maybe they’ll get sick. They’ll need time off for personal reasons or simply to go on vacation.
All of this can set back your content production – especially if they don’t communicate well.
Video Editing Services
In contrast, opting for a professional video editing agency gives you several back-up options and advantages. For one, these companies already vet their editing staff during the hiring process. At Tasty Edits, for instance, only 0.5% of applicants make the cut, and they undergo a rigorous internal training regime before they get to work on client projects.
Plus, you have redundancies. If your assigned editor has to take some time off or if the volume of projects they have to cope with increases, there are several other members of the editing team who can jump in and make sure that your edits are finished on time.
Finally, looking at video editing services, you can also hit up places like Trustpilot and Google My Business to check out a diversity of reviews by former clients. These will give you in-depth insights into what it’s like to work with each service.
Assess Their Skills and Compare Pricing
To hire great video editors, you need to vet their technical editing skills and compare their pricing structures.
Once you’ve found a few candidates – whether freelancers or companies – check out their portfolios and see whether they actually edit the kind of content you are aiming to create. Many freelance editors and quite a few video editing services specialize in individual content niches. Someone who’s used to editing testimonial videos and product tutorials may not be comfortable taking on projects like travel vlogs or action videos.
Taking a look at what type of edits they’ve done in the past also helps you assess their capacity for producing the effects you want, like transitions, SFX, and VFX.
Next, there’s pricing. Most freelance editors have standard project-based pricing. Some offer different packages based on the complexity of edits or on the raw footage length. Finally, they sometimes offer retainer options. Here, you pay a fixed sum every month, and they set aside a certain amount of time for work on your projects.
For video editing services, the big distinction is between project-based and subscription-based pricing. Video editing subscriptions are often advertised as “unlimited” video editing. In return for a monthly fee, you can submit as many video orders as you like. However, the devil’s in the details. Even though you can submit an unlimited number of orders, they’ll only be edited one after the other. This effectively caps the number of videos you can produce every month.
In contrast, video editing services that offer package- and project-based pricing can edit multiple projects in parallel. There are often discounts if you purchase credits for several edits as a batch. If you already know that your content creation workflow will mean having multiple simultaneous edits underway, this is the better option for you.
Reach Out and Test Communication
The final step before hiring great video editors is to reach out and see whether a video editor’s workflows and communication style match yours. In short, this is where you check whether you can feasibly work with someone on a personal basis.
A video editor needs to attune to your personal style and comprehend your creative vision. To achieve that, communication is key.
Reach out to both the freelance video editors you’re considering and the video editing services and see how they respond. How fast do they answer your queries? What kinds of questions do they ask you? Are they transparent about their pricing, availability, and turnaround times?
All of this will help you assess whether they’re the right person – or company – to work with to hit your content creation goals.
As a side note: Video editing services sometimes offer custom workflow dashboards to streamline orders and communication. Tasty Edits, for example, provides VOMA, a proprietary Video Order Management Application built on years of creator feedback. Here, you can submit orders, share raw footage, coordinate with your editors, review drafts, and download final deliverables. If the video editing agencies you’re looking at offer this kind of tool, give it a test spin before you make your final decision.
Finally, if you’ve got several candidates left at this point and are willing to spend some money on making the right choice, order some test edits. That, in the end, is the best way to really see what you’ll get.
The Bottom Line on Finding Great Editors
There is no fool-proof answer to how to hire great video editors. At the end of the day, a good dash of luck needs to be involved to find the perfect editor for your needs.
However, by being systematic about it – following the steps above – you maximize your chances of pinpointing a fantastic editor. That’s how you find someone who’ll support your journey as a creator and help you take your content to the next level.
