The Best Training on Lynda.com for Film Editors

Lynda.com is a hugely valuable resource for digital creatives the world over who want to pick up new skills, learn new software packages or hone their craft. I’ve used Lynda.com in the past (Larry Jordan’s training on Soundtrack Pro was especially helpful back in the day) and thoroughly enjoyed having instant access to so much quality training with over 2200 courses and counting.

One of the main benefits of Lynda.com is that you can simply pay for a month at a time and cancel whenever you’re not using it. The best way to get a real feel for what’s available is get a 10 day free trial with complete access to the whole site to give it a test drive for yourself. Personally I find it easier to learn whilst following along, so if you do sign up, I’d recommend getting a subscription with a exercise files included.

All that said, I thought it would be useful to round up some of the best training for film editors that’s available on Lynda.com, which will help you get to grips with the skills, software and knowledge you need to flourish in the business.

NOTE: On some browsers all of the freebie tasters embedded in this post seem to show up as black boxes, but if you click play you’ll get a free lesson from each course.

Learning Editing Craft on Lynda.com

In this series from editor Ashley Kennedy has put together a two hour series of tutorials on Narrative Scene editing inside of Avid Media Composer. Although many of the techniques Ashley demonstrates are unique to Media Composer such as Avid’s ScriptSync but most of the editing knowledge is applicable in any NLE.

Trainer Christine Steele takes the same content as the course above but puts it to work with Narrative Scene Editing Inside Premiere Pro. If you’re new to Premiere Pro CC this is an excellent course for mastering all the fundamentals, as well as honing your editing craft.

Another great series to check out is Norman Hollyn’s Foundations for Video Editing. Norman is a Professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts (and he also wrote the very handy Film Editing Room Handbook) and in this 4 hour NLE agnostic series, he teaches you the essential principles of the craft of film editing from script analysis to recutting your work.

After Effects for Film Editors on Lynda.com

One of the main programs that I get asked if I know as an editor, more than any other is After Effects. Thanks to Adobe’s Creative Cloud there really isn’t any reason not to grab hold of this industry standard graphics and animation application and learn how to do the basics at the very least.

One of the problems with Lynda.com is the huge amount of training to choose from, for example there are 101 results of After Effects alone (which is why an endless membership is handy – but only if you have an endless amount of time to watch everything!). Personally I would start with an ‘Essentials’ series on the latest version of the software like this one from Ian Robinson, which at 11 hours long, will give you a very solid grounding in working with After Effects.

Another useful way of whittling down the training on offer to what you actually need to watch is to filter by the latest version of the software, After Effects CC, or by skill level. This intermediate series, again from Ian Robinson, looks very good if you’re interested in creating more complex composites.

Documentary Editing Training

This 20 minute presentation from documentary editor Steve Audette is not on Lynda.com but it’s too good not to share. A great primer on After Effects for any documentary editor, Steve shares some excellent tips on using After Effects to take your stills and storytelling to the next level. Another documentary series, again from editor Ashley Kennedy that is on Lynda.com is her three hour series on Documentary editing. In this freebie you can learn how to use the Fluid Morph transition in Media Composer to seamlessly hide jump cuts within an interview, a personal favourite of Steve Audette.

Learning To Color Grade on Lynda.com

On of the surprising drawbacks of Lynda.com is that there is currently no training for professional level color correction programs like DaVinci Resolve or Baselight. Ripple Training however do have several excellent series from colorist Alexis Van Hurkman on DaVinci Resolve 9 (soon to be updated to 10).

That said, if you don’t want to pay twice for training this 4 hour series from Mixing Light Patrick Inhofer will get you up to speed with Speedgrade CC and again comes as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud package. So you may as well learn the tools you have! The benefit of a course like Patrick’s is that many of the techniques you will learn in this series are totally applicable in other grading applications or NLE color correctors, so you’ll learn plenty of colour grading skills as well as which buttons to press inside Speedgrade specifically.