You will quickly learn if you are outputting video for a client who is bound to feed back and expect changes to adapt an editing technique that allows you to go back, find footage you might have deleted from the timeline, jump to another camera angle at a certain point or reconnect audio that you had discarded. Often the people making the decisions do not understand the choices you made and insist on something else, for this reason it is important to take a photoshop technique to editing in a way that is non destuctive. Here’s a few tips.

At capture stage be sure not to be too precise with your timecodes, always capture with ample handles and this sometimes means shooting a little more at the begininning and end of each clip, this will not only allow for better constructed transitions but also save the annoyance of not being able to extend the clip that extra little bit to fit to the timing of the edit.

Always keep you original files as raw and unedited as possible. Do not apply effects on the camera or work on the footage in another program and save it down, keep your editing options as versitile as possible.

Re order! Don’t delete! I often shoot a presentation on two cameras and sync the two. If you have made a decision about which camera the viewer will see, keep the unused clip but place it on the layer below in the timeline or on a hidden layer. There’s always some who might say, can we have this camera at this point? Just because they can!

If you are working with graphics then Adobe Premiere Pro is great for importing images or projects both psd’s and aep’s directly in the timeline but be sure when you right click and edit in Photoshop or After Effects you don’t make irreversible changes, always make a backup copy and work in layers so you turn on and off elements at will.