Why you should spend £4000 on Inside The Edit

• Why is Inside The Edit worth the money?
• Save 20% on Inside The Edit Promo Code
• Free Inside The Edit Tutorials

The reason you should seriously consider spending £4000/$6,600 on Inside The Edit is because it’s a career-changing new way of learning what it means to be not only, a skilled editor but a competent filmmaker too.

Someone who understands what it takes to craft a story from start to finish and tell it well, someone who is dedicated enough to commit their time, money, energy and passion to that artistic and professional end.

UPDATE March 2024

This post is now ten years old!

In that time Inside the Edit has gone through has gone through a few evolutions in terms of pricing structures, course additions and approaches.

Yet, it remains one of the absolute best online video editing courses available today. In the past decade, it hasn’t been matched in terms of depth, quality or practical expertise.

As of today, there are two ways to learn with Inside The Edit (ITE).

• Lifetime membership to the full ITE course for £1500+VAT (where applicable)
• The ITE Pro Editor Program. A £15,000, one-year Masters-level supervised training

To understand the difference between the two and see which approach might suit you best, take the time to digest this detailed review of the Inside The Edit Pro Editor Program.

To gain further insights and details on Inside The Edit, check out these previous posts:

• Inside The Edit – The Pro Editor Course Review (2023)
• Lessons from Inside The Edit – October (2017)
• Learn Documentary Editing from Professional Editors – (2019)
• An Alternative Film School for Video Editors

UPDATE – 2017

* 20% OFF PROMO CODE FOR ALL INSIDE THE EDIT MEMBERSHIPS *

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In the video above, I was fortunate enough to get to chat to Paddy Bird, professional editor and founder of Inside The Edit, 5 days before the launch of the course. (Available from today – August 20th 2014).

As it’s my first Skype interview please excuse the initial few visual hiccups (!) but do enjoy the content of the chat, in which Paddy talks through how the course works, what’s involved and why there’s nothing else like it out there. Thanks to Paddy for giving me so much of his time!

UPDATE Dec 2015: For the month of December you can save 20% off the cost of the course, which allows you to snap up a bargain. You’ll want to buy the annual plan though, as the 20% discount only applies to the first month of the monthly pricing.

To celebrate this, Inside The Edit have also released a new 20 minute tutorial from the course – 7.8 Gear Changes, so scroll to the bottom of this post to enjoy all the free tutorials released so far.

UPDATE 2015: As of January 20th 2015 new monthly and annual subscription pricing options are available, which means you can invest in your editing career in a much more affordable fashion.

As part of the launch for the monthly subscription you can check out a free 45 minute lesson (scroll to the bottom of this post for it) on how best to implement your B-roll in a documentary edit. Which if you do nothing else, is well worth a watch.

Other additions to the Inside The Edit offering include the more frequent release of new tutorials to a weekly basis, as well as the launch of a new industry insiders blog. They also have plans to launch an annual editing competition and open their Raw Footage Store where you can buy professional level practice footage, to cut your editing chops on.

UPDATE 2014: Due to huge demand, three new pricing options have been introduced to help more people take advantage of Inside The Edit. Now if you’re a student you can access the course at massive 75% discount of the original price. There are also now two volume pricing options and if that wasn’t enough they have extended the 25% (£1000) launch offer too!

Our new Student Price of £1,000 is available to anyone in a degree-granting or certificate-granting course. We are also introducing volume license pricing for Educational Institutions, Broadcasters, Post houses and Production companies to cope with the serious lack of pro level creative training within the post-production sector.

Thus far the internet generation of filmmakers (myself included) are used to finding a plethora of free tutorials online (some of them very good, some of them terrible) on how to do X or Y in this piece of software, or an interview or two with a professional on this or that part of their career. We’re all hungry to learn and sometimes we’ll even pay for content if we think it might contain enough valuable insights we can’t otherwise get for free.

But I’m not sure we’re quite prepared for the scale and scope of what Inside The Edit offers, as it is categorically different from everything else out there.

What is Inside The Edit?

Inside the Edit is essentially packing in 15+ years of Paddy Bird’s professional editing expertise, filtered and refined through two years of high level teaching experience – helping others to grasp the theory and practice of editing for film and TV, crammed into an extensive series of lessons (accessed online in video form), focused on unpacking the detailed creative process of shaping a broadcast quality documentary.

All of which will take weeks, if not months, of dedicated labour for you to complete. It’s a year long filmschool from an editor’s unique perspective.

As someone who did a degree in Film and TV Production then launched and sustained a freelance editing career over the past (nearly) 10 years I’m really excited that Paddy and the team at Inside The Edit have put this course together. Firstly because I think it’s going to be a very compelling alternative to students considering going to film school (buy a tricked out Mac and this course instead for a lot less money) as long as they have the patience and self-discipline to see it through.

Secondly, it is a huge leg-up to any experienced editor looking to develop their skills so they can move across into long-form editing for film and TV. Although Paddy’s focus is documentary editing, the skills required to understand and construct a story from the ground up apply to many different genres and industry sectors. Plus if you complete the course you’ll also have your own cut of a complete documentary to use as a showreel piece.

The Industry Problems Inside The Edit Seeks to Address

Most editors are self taught in their craft and skill-base because they usually don’t have an on-going relationship with anyone else a little further along to teach them, largely because the opportunity historically given by the apprentice and assistant roles has been irradiated by shrinking budgets, tighter turn arounds and nomadic freelance workforces.

And if you do want to learn how to edit you can only achieve this by doing it, a lot. But without access to professional quality footage it’s hard to cut your teeth on the problems that professional editors face day-to-day. What’s more, even if you do get a job in a post facility and are able to work your way up, there can sometimes be a culture of companies being reluctant to invest fully in their staff, in case they jump ship for the freelance life somewhere else.

Whilst film schools can be an excellent way to try out a number of different roles within a film crew and get a taste for what you might want to pursue as a career they rarely give you this kind of singular input and instruction to enable you to learn enough to actually be employable as more than a runner upon graduation.

Why Paddy is Uniquely Placed to Teach this Course

Having chatted to Paddy for over an hour about his hopes for Inside The Edit and all the students who take the course, he definitely seems uniquely placed to teach it. Firstly, he has honed his craft over nearly two decades of professional editing for many of the major TV channels. So he knows what it takes to cut it at the top and to handle the pressure, challenges and dynamics of the edit suite.

He’s also taught editing for nearly two years, which means all of his skills and insights have been refined as he’s been forced to communicate them in such a way that other people will understand them. He’s also been exposed to thousands of questions from hundreds of students, on their struggles, thought processes, things that can’t quite grasp and the many barriers to entry into the industry that they face. These experiences have all shaped the course for the better.

So What Do You Get For £4000?

In concrete terms:

• 35 hours of professionally shot documentary footage delivered on a hard drive.
• 2000 tracks from Universal Music to use in your (non-commercial) work.
• 80 tutorials (more are coming in the next few months).
• 1 Year subscription access to the site.*

That said, what you’re actually paying for is the career changing education that will make you a better, more employable editor. One who is skilled in creating engaging stories. Plus, with membership to the site you have on-going access to the rest of the Inside the Edit community of editors and teachers, with an opportunity to get feedback and support as you share your work, and all of the latest tutorials and insights from Paddy and the team as the release more content. That is worth a lot more than can be condensed into three bullet points.

What Inside The Edit is:
– A sound investment in your filmmaking career.
– A hefty commitment to see it through. You can’t binge watch this stuff.
– Access to exceptional creative insights and experience you can’t short cut your way to.
– Expert teaching and educational techniques.

What Inside The Edit is not:
– It is not a series of technical tutorials on how to use editing software.
– It is not a really long expensive Youtube tutorial made by a well meaning amateur.
– It is not just for editors, but for all filmmakers looking to hone their storytelling craft.

In Summary

If you’ve gotten this far in the article, you probably think I’m definitely out to sell you Inside The Edit, having waxed lyrical about how great it is. Well, I am genuinely excited about it and as you can see for yourself from the quality of the demo tutorials and the calibre of Paddy’s passion for teaching high-quality editing to eager students – there’s not a lot not to like.

Is £4000 a lot of money? Yes, definitely. But in terms of value for money, if you’re looking to make a sound investment in the next stage of your career or secure a solid foundation for the start of a new one, I think it will be hard to beat what Inside The Edit has to offer.