How To Brief A Video Editor

If you are on the third round of changes with an editor, the problem started before they opened the file.

Almost every revision I see traces back to something the brief never said. The editor made a reasonable choice, it was not the choice you had in your head, and neither of you knew that until you watched it.

Send a reference, not adjectives

"Make it punchy" means nothing. Two people will build two different videos from it.

Send a link to a video that already does what you want and say which part. "The cut speed in the first eight seconds" or "the way the captions sit low and large" is a brief. "Punchy" is a mood.

One reference with two specific notes beats a paragraph of description every time.

Say what the first three seconds must be

This is the only part of the video most people will ever see, so it is the part worth deciding yourself.

Tell the editor what the opening frame shows and what the first line is. If you leave it to them, you get whatever the raw footage started with, which is usually you adjusting the camera.

Give them the structure, not just the footage

The editor is not the strategist. If you hand over 40 minutes of raw take and say "make three reels", they will guess at what matters.

Instead: this section is the hook, this section is the point, this bit at 14:20 is the one that has to be in there. You watched the take. They have not.

Timestamps are the single highest-leverage thing you can put in a brief.

Decide the format before, not after

Aspect ratio, length, captions or no captions, music or no music, where it is going. These are five decisions that take you ten seconds and cost an editor an entire re-export if they get them wrong.

If it is going to more than one platform, say which platforms in the brief. Recutting a 9:16 into 1:1 is not free.

Build a standard so you stop briefing from scratch

The first few briefs are long. After that they should be short, because most of the answer is the same every time.

Write down your caption style, your font, your colour, your intro and outro treatment, your music direction, your pace. Put it in one document. Now the brief per video is three lines and a set of timestamps, and the editor already knows the other twenty answers.

That is the difference between an editor who needs you and an editor who runs.

Give feedback once, in one place

Scattered feedback over three messages across two days is how a one-round change becomes four.

Watch the whole thing. Write every note with a timestamp. Send it in one message. Then let them work.

What this actually buys you

The bottleneck in most content operations is not filming and it is not editing. It is the loop between them.

A business that films once a month and takes three weeks to publish is producing at a fraction of its capacity. Fix the brief and the same shoot, the same editor and the same footage produce more, faster, without anyone working harder.

That is the difference between posting when you get around to it and posting on a schedule you can actually hold.