Cut by Cut: Editing Your Film or Video

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic for College Students and Aspiring Film Makers
Review: Cut by Cut: Editing your Film or Video is fantastic for college students, aspiring film makers, and anyone who wants to increase their knowledge of editing. It provides detailed step-by-step instructions through the entire editing process. Starting with the decisions that must be made before the footage arrives in the cutting room, it delineates the editor's entire path until the show appears on the screen, tube, or web. Along the way it de-mystifies how an editor adds narration and music, creates fade-ins and other visual effects, and what sound editors and mixers do. The book goes far beyond the craft of editing, telling filmmakers all they need to know to edit their project, be it a drama for the cinema, a documentary for TV, or a short for the Web.
Cut by Cut also informs the reader about how to survive and succeed as an editor in the real world of the cutting room. It discusses the editor's working relationship with the director, producer, clients, or other "powers that be." It supplies budget forms with a comprehensive list of items required for each phase of editing which the reader can use on every project. Lastly, it provides a resource list of helpful books, training facilities, websites, etc. and a section on how to look for editing jobs.
The book contains many diagrams, photos and tables to drive home its points and make it a-can't-do-without-it reference book. It is written in a warm style so the reader often feels like they are having a conversation with an expert editor rather than reading a textbook. It is divided into three sections corresponding to the three stages of post-production. It contains checklists, budget forms, suggested exercises, and illustrations that range from photographs and diagrams to charts and drawings. Seasoned with observations from respected editors and filmmakers, it also offers anecdotes from the author's years in the cutting room.


Rating:
Summary: A Top Notch Editing Guide
Review: To give you my opinion of this book, all I need to do is give you an excerpt from my formal review, posted on AbsoluteWrite.com:

"Chandler's book is a comprehensive, well-organized, and incredibly detailed how-to book on film and video editing, written by an experienced professional editor. The author takes her readers from soup to nuts, covering everything from how to prepare the cutting room before an editing project starts, to technical descriptions about the processes and equipment used by editors in their daily work, to an in-depth discussion on how a project is 'finished' onto tape, disc, or film."

It's really is a top-notch book for anyone who wants to learn what it is that editors do!