Managing Editors: The Failures Are Rarely About Editing

Teams lose editors over three things, and none of them is the difficulty of the work: unpredictable hours, briefs vague enough that the first cut was always going to be wrong, and notes arriving from two people who disagree with each other.

All three are management decisions rather than talent problems, and all three are fixable in a week. Start by naming one approver per project, which removes the largest single source of wasted hours.

Contradictory notes are the biggest waste

From r/editors on the standard fix: "Use a platform like frame or Vimeo review links for feedback. That way, the stakeholders can have all their fights as comments on the video in"

The phrasing is the useful part. Stakeholder disagreement is going to happen. The question is whether it happens on the video before an editor starts, or lands in their inbox afterwards as two instructions that cannot both be followed. Only the first is survivable on a deadline.

On the form notes should take, from r/SocialMediaMarketing: "Use screen recordings or timestamps instead of essays. You can drop comments right on the video, frame by frame, so your notes are visual and"

And a tracking method inside the project, from r/premiere: "Clip Marker the notes in the version the producer watched. Markers show up in the new version. Delete the marker after each note is completed."

Protect the hours, or price them

Editors are explicit about what long days are worth. From r/editors: "I charge time and a half for hours 9 and 10, and double time past 10 hours in a day."

And from r/editors: "I treat weekend work as 1.5x anyway, and any time beyond 6-8 hours 2x."

If you run a team on salary rather than by the hour, those numbers still apply, you are simply paying them in attrition instead of money. A rush week that nobody was compensated for is a resignation three months later, and replacing an editor who knows your clients costs far more than the premium would have.

Cutting around 5,000 videos a year, the operational rule that matters most is keeping rush work genuinely exceptional. A team that is always at capacity has no slack to absorb the one project that goes wrong, and something always goes wrong.

Make the work portable

• One project and bin structure on every job, so anyone can open anyone's timeline.
• File naming and delivery specs written down rather than remembered.
• Proxy settings standardised, and proxies stored somewhere shared.
• A brief template that collects references, length and conventions up front.
• Client conventions documented per account, not held in one editor's head.

The test: can a second editor pick up a project mid-edit without a phone call? If not, every holiday and illness is a crisis, and the person carrying the most context is also the person who can never take a week off.

Judge people on the right things

Skill is visible early. What predicts a working relationship is how someone handles being corrected, which an agency owner in r/agency identifies directly: "An editor might be great at editing their own work but how are they handling clients? Some people take revisions and changes very personally and"

So review the revision behaviour, not just the output. Does the next version address the note precisely, or drift? Does a clarifying question arrive before the work starts, or a guess after? Those habits compound across a year far more than raw speed does.

Give people the part they are good at

There is a development argument for structure too. From r/editors: "If an agency is run well, you get to learn workflows and toolsets that make you better."

That is the thing a firm can offer that freelancing cannot, and it is worth being deliberate about. Rotate people across formats so nobody is doing only the tedious work, and pair a junior with a senior on the first job for any new client rather than sending them in cold.

The short version

• One named approver per project. Disagreements resolve before the edit starts.
• Notes as timestamps on the video, consolidated into one round.
• Keep rush work exceptional, and pay for it when it is not.
• Standardise structure and specs so any project is portable.
• Assess how people handle revisions, not only what they deliver.

Read next

• The Editing Workflow Changes That Actually Save Hours, for the workflow standards worth enforcing.
• How to Hire a Video Editor: The Complete Guide, for recruiting the people you will manage.

If capacity rather than process is the constraint, we work as overflow for editing teams at a flat $18 an hour with a 48-hour turnaround, and the first video is free up to four editing hours.