Post-production is one of those areas where people tend to bundle a whole raft of necessary skills and experience into a single word – usually Editor.  Of course, the skills needed for almost any good post-production are those of an Offline Editor, Online Editor, Sound Designer, Audio Mixer, Motion Graphics Designer, Colorist, Mastering Engineer and often Post Supervisor/Producer.

Depending on the scale and complexity of the project – and the budget – you may actually have all of these people in your Post team, but more often than not they are combined into one or two people… a lower budget Offline Editor (often the project Producer) to spend the many hours needed to put the right pieces together more or less in the right order, and a more expensive Finished Editor (or Online Editor) who can handle the rest of the processes needed to get an outstanding result.

(The same thing happens with Production, where so many people say they need a Videographer instead of a Producer, Director, Cinematographer, AC, Gaffer, Audio Recordist and so on… it’s a pet peeve, as you can probably tell).

For the Offline Editor this might just be a laptop, thunderbolt hard drive and headphones along with a table to work at – but most of the other roles need a lot more powerful equipment and software, and a controlled environment in which to carry out the more precise operations.

Of course, just to be mess up my definition, some post production work can also be done on location while a shoot is taking place – this is usually a combination of assembly editing to see the direction a program is going and meet a restrictive deadline, and/or color grading the raw footage so that the Director and DP can more tightly control how their images look.

I do take on location editing projects, as well as location color grading and even some higher end DIT work – and have a bunch of transportable equipment available to do this work, which tends to be very long and rather uncomfortable, balanced by good food and company plus the satisfaction of being able to help fine tune a project at the source in time for changes to be made during the shoot to get the best result at the right time.