Books on Editing

Eddie B

Eddie B

Active member
I'm looking for some good books on film editing (not related to software, but the actual power of editing.) There seem to be a lot of highly regarded options out there and I just wanted some dvxuser recommendations to see if there was a general consensus.

My current main contenders are:

In the Blink of an Eye
The Eye is Quicker
On Editing Film
 
That's a good post, I would also not mind getting more information on this.

My company is very new and I'm in an interesting dilemma because I've not done any professional editing myself, though I have an extremely professional editing setup (all of the bells and whistles). I've always worked with a friend from film school who I now consider a very good editor. Problem is he isn't in town anymore, he's a good 100 miles out, and my company focuses on corporate work, which I would like to edit myself. I have some experience editing going back about 4-5 years, and have continued to do this and that little stuff, plus every project we've done has been edited on my computers with me watching, so I have a good understanding of the technical side. Because I pay a sales employee full-time, I really must be able to edit my own stuff for the next year or two so that I can increase my profit margins enough to stay in business. If we get too busy, I'd love never to have to edit anything myself, but for now it just seems smart to do it myself especially because it requires 0 investment of money as I have this amazing machine completely at my disposal, but I just don't have all of the skills yet.

Time to practice hard! haha

It's always tough, as I'm sure Eddie you probably are aware, that you try to read all of these books and it just takes so long. I've been reading a ton of books on acting and directing months ago, then I switched to reading as many screenwriting books as I could find, in the past I've read a lot of cinematography books. Then I come from a background in film criticism and film history so I've read dozens and dozens of works there, plus I've written two myself.
 
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Eddie B said:
I'm looking for some good books on film editing (not related to software, but the actual power of editing.) There seem to be a lot of highly regarded options out there and I just wanted some dvxuser recommendations to see if there was a general consensus.

My current main contenders are:

In the Blink of an Eye
The Eye is Quicker
On Editing Film
Click to expand...

These are books I have as well. I would recommend getting every single movie mentioned, (Netfilx would be good for this...), and watch each mentioned cut...

Another one by Pepperman is:

Film School: How to Watch DVDs and Learn Everything About Filmmaking
 
I've been hobby editing for over 10 years which really helped my craft when I started doing actual film editing. I wish I could tell you which book to read, but I would say good editing comes from actual experience.

I would recommend watching "The Cutting Edge: The magic of movie editing" which gives alot of great insight on how people in the industry do it.

I absolutely LOVE editing and it's my favorite part of the filmmaking process (only rivaled by writing). I would HIGHLY recommend just messing around in your editing program (whatever it may be) to get a feel for it.
 
First of all, thanks for recognizing that editing is not about software. I started a thread about that a few months ago, but only a couple of people really bit.

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=176873&highlight=editing

I've read and enjoyed all the books listed above. The 5 C's of Cinematography also has a chapter on "Cutting" (keeping to the theme of the book) which is useful. Sam O'Steen's CUT TO THE CHASE is a book about his experiences as an editor, which is not strictly about technique, but it has some good tidbits, as does the book Murch wrote about his experiences cutting Cold Mountain on FCP...although I can't remember the name of that book at the moment.
 
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