This is my archive of knowledge, mostly from when I was an assistant editor. Updated infrequently, but hopefully still useful.
Managing VFX is a daunting subject and a big task, even for smaller films. It’s also a difficult workflow to try to describe generically, but after many years of requests for a writeup on the job of a VFX Editor, I decided to give it a shot. Here goes…
Here's my attempt to write a somewhat future-proof guide to getting the materials of your film turned over to all the various departments that editors and assistant editors interact with.
On Star Trek Into Darkness, we put a lot of effort into creating and maintaining a running 5.1 temp mix inside Media Composer. This article gives you an in-depth look at the process, both technically and creatively, and the challenges we solved along the way.
Here's a tip from Re-Recording Mixer Will Files on using Track Effects to instantly make your production audio cleaner and more intelligible.
VFX Editor George McCarthy showed me this workflow on Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, and allowed me to publicize it here. I've also created a tool and desktop app to allow you to do this quickly on your own.
This article breaks down in detail the editorial challenges and workflow used to deal with IMAX and all of the film formats shot for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Regular Expressions are definitely one techie level up from your traditional tech tip, but they're definitely worth the time to learn, even if you only learn the basics. A regular expression is very much like a math formula, and you use them when you want to find (and replace) pieces of text using a condition instead of knowing the text in advance.
If you're on a job by yourself, or new to a job working as an assistant to a less tech savvy editor, you'll need to know how to troubleshoot without calling someone.