How to brief a video editor
Six things, ten minutes, written once before anybody opens the footage.
The round you are dreading is the fifth one. Notes going back and forth, the same two changes not quite landing, a video that was supposed to take a week now three weeks old and no longer about anything topical.
That loop is largely decided before the first cut exists. Not by the editor's ability, and not by how fussy you are, but by how much of what is in your head made it onto paper before they started. Ten minutes of writing is the highest-return work in the whole process, and it gets skipped because at the moment it needs doing it feels like delay.
Why is the brief where the revision count is decided?
Because an editor without a brief is not guessing randomly. They are building the version that seems most reasonable to them, and then discovering your version by subtraction, one round at a time.
Every note you send is information that could have arrived at the start. Shorter. Less music. Keep the bit where I explain the second step. All of that existed in your head before filming. Sending it in instalments, after the work has been done a different way, means paying for the same minute of video several times over. The relationship then goes wrong for a reason that looks like carelessness on both sides and is really just sequencing.
What goes in a ten-minute brief?
Six items. Written, not said on a call, because the person editing at eleven at night needs to be able to reread it.
The result, in one sentence
What is supposed to happen because this video exists. Views, enquiries, sales, subscribers, recognition. One of them, chosen, in a plain sentence. Without this, every other line in the brief is a preference rather than a criterion.
Who it is for
Not a demographic. A person, described in a line, with what they already know and what worries them. Someone who has played piano for two years and thinks their hands are the problem gives an editor more usable direction than any amount of audience segmentation, because it settles pace, vocabulary and how much explanation survives the cut.
Three videos you like, and specifically what about each
The single highest-value item on the list, and the one people fill in worst. Send links, not adjectives. Then, beside each, say the specific thing: the way this one opens on the work rather than on a face, the way this one has no music under speech, the way this one puts text on screen only when it is answering a question.
Three references with three specific reasons is a style guide. Three with the note something like these is a rehearsal for disappointment, because you and the editor are looking at different features of the same video and neither of you knows it.
What must not happen
The list nobody writes. No shot of my hands. Do not speed up the demonstrations. No trending audio. Do not cut my pauses out, I use them deliberately. Never show the workshop in the background.
Prohibitions are worth more per word than preferences. They are absolute, they cannot be misinterpreted, and they cover the failures that make you actively unhappy rather than mildly unsatisfied.
Where it will be published
Which platform, which shape, whether it will be watched with sound. A video for a website is constructed differently from the same content on a phone, and an editor who finds out afterwards has to rebuild rather than adjust.
The deadline that is real
Not the one you would prefer. The date something actually depends on, and if nothing does, say so. An editor who knows which of three jobs has the real deadline can sequence them properly. One told everything is urgent chooses on their own, and the video that matters most is not reliably the one they pick.
Why does showing beat describing?
Because the words we use for video are shared and the meanings are not.
Punchy means fast cuts to one person and short duration to another. Clean means minimal graphics to one and colour-corrected to another. Professional means almost nothing at all. Two people can agree on all three words and produce completely different videos, then argue about which one is wrong.
A link does not have this problem. It is unambiguous the moment it is watched. The only work left is naming which part of it you meant, which takes one sentence and eliminates the entire class of disagreement above.
What is wrong with "make it more dynamic"?
It describes an effect on you rather than a change to the video.
The editor now has to reverse engineer a cause from your reaction, and there are perhaps nine candidates: pace, music, shot variety, section order, the length of the opening, movement in frame, the grade, the sound, or content that is thin in the middle and cannot be edited out of being thin. They pick one. If they pick wrong, that is a round.
The repair is to say what you want changed, at a timecode. Cut from the first line to the demonstration at fourteen seconds and lose the wide shot. You do not need the vocabulary of an editor to do this. You need to say what should be different and where.
The fastest improvement available to you
Watch your own last video and write down three things you did not like about it.
That is it. It takes eight minutes and produces better direction than any template, because it is specific to your own work rather than to video in general, and because dislikes are far easier to articulate than aspirations. Anybody reading those three lines learns more about what you want than they would from an hour on a call.
Send it with the footage. The next thing you send is either the same three lines again, which tells you something, or three different ones, which is what progress looks like from the inside.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
Start with a free audit
Tell us where your content is now. We will come back with what we would change and what result to expect.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.