Video Editing Business

Questions and Comments
#1

Recently I figured out that if I enjoy editing photos, editing videos shouldn’t be difficult for me to learn.

Is anyone here doing a video editing business? I have been thinking about taking up a video editing course with plans to monetize the skill as by providing video editing as a service.

I am seeing this is as a more lucrative venture than my current business consulting work which is going nowhere and wearing me out with the slow momentum and an over-specialized market.

Eventually, I want to set up my own video-editing services company with lots of staff to train, develop and motivate.

If that’s my direction, what subliminals would be best for achieving my goals?

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#2

You’ll run up against legions of highly skilled video editors on Fiverr and similar sites, who are willing and able to do the work for a fraction of what you would need to charge to be profitable. A better solution is to focus on an agency model… you find local/etc clients but outsource the bulk of the actual video editing work to freelancers online. You’d be acting as a general contractor, delegating specific work to experts and pocketing the difference as your profit.

Just my 2c.

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#3

Its gonna be a tough one considering this kind of work can be done in india and alot of the developing countries for peanuts.

Do you have a portfolio of potential clients ? if not then its gonna be extremely challenging.

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#4

^^ This.

Focus on finding high-quality local clients, and then outsource the work. And yes you’ll need a portfolio, but the best part is you can vet freelancers by having them do demo projects, and then the best pieces become your portfolio. Over time, you can replace those with actual client work if you like.

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#5

This is very good advice. Thanks for your input.

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#6

Keep in mind that video has a number of different aspects to it that are normally done by different professionals. Editing is all about storytelling (Recommended lit: Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye). Color grading is what you’d normally do when you edit photos - those skills will translate to some extent but you’ll need to get familiar with techniques for video such as moving objects (Recommendation: Download daVinci Resolve, free version, and get familiar with it). Sound is yet another beast that is a profession in itself and is too often treated as an afterthought. It’s crazy how often you see nicely done video work with awful sound in it. (Recommendation: Jay Rose, Audio Postproduction for Film and Video).
And, of course, there’s the whole wide world of special effects.

Your first choice is if you want to offer full post-production (in which case you’ll probably want to outsource some of these jobs, e.g. focus on editing and outsource the rest) or just do one of them, or do a full agency model and outsource everything. (For remote workflow have a look at frame.io, best solution I know.)

It’s certainly interesting and some photo skills translate very well, it’s just also a lot on top.

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