You know, the biggest struggle as an editor is the boring projects, long days of work, and not having enough clips to make your idea come to life, but you have to do it anyway because there’s a deadline. Being a real editor is not as glamorous as it looks on the internet, so let me take you on the complete ride from first message to final delivery. Welcome to another client project. As you can see on the Fiverr dashboard, I have close to $10,000 worth of active orders right now, with some of them being $4,000 and $1,500. My team is working on all of these, and if you see this order right here for LeadJet, this is the same client we did the construction roofing project for. The delivery date is set for a few days, but he asked if we can get this done by the end of the week. Because he’s a repeat client, he just texted that he is looking to get another montage video—a horizontal edit—and there is handheld footage shot at a high frame rate, so I can slow it down. He just sent the footage, and that’s it. My team pitched $130 for it, which is close to 12,000 rupees for a short video.
There is not much information provided by the client, so in such cases, I usually go to the order history to see the past projects we have done for him and check what the editing style was like. We’ll start by creating the project in Premiere Pro. There are just 54 clips, which is perfect for a small project like this. I see there are horizontal clips as well as vertical, but I remember the client said the final output needs to be horizontal. I have imported the clips, but the main thing here is the frame rate. The client said all the camera handheld footage is in 60 fps, which is great practice if you’re a client because it can be slowed down. As an editor, you can’t make a high frame rate sequence because mostly these videos will go on Instagram or Facebook, which support standard frame rates to look natural on those feeds. What you have to do is slow down these clips.
A good practice is to see what devices they shot it on; they have some camera clips and drone clips, and you can see the drone clips are in 23 fps, so we’ll create a matching sequence. To do that, we can just select all the camera clips, right-click, go to modify, interpret footage, and assume the frame rate as 24 fps, which will basically slow all the clips down so we can speed ramp it in post. I’m a little lazy, so I like to create a sequence by just dragging a clip onto the timeline. This is the part where I do the assembly. While assembling, I basically go through the footage, select the good parts, cut the bad parts, take where the action is happening, and drop it on the timeline. They have vertical clips also, so we’ll see how we can incorporate that into the edit. Wow, it’s the same clips both in horizontal and vertical, and since the client wants a specific duration edit, it will be interesting to see how we stretch it out. I think this is the final result of the construction, but I can’t tell for sure. Even when I don’t understand something during assembly, I still like to add it to the timeline, and maybe later it will all make sense. I think they’re using a really good camera because the footage looks cool, but it’s all vertical. Shots like the ones where you see the logo in the back are really good for branding. We can use some of these shots in the intro to establish what company is working and what they’re trying to show.
They’re making a concrete pathway that leads to the house from what I can tell. I’m almost done through the assembly, and we would have to make a video chronologically, which basically means showing how the process is happening—we build up and then show the final output. We only have drone clips for the final output, but I also wanted to use some drone clips in the beginning just for extra wow points. We don’t have much else to work with to make a video out of these clips, a large portion of which are vertical and where not a lot is happening. Once assembly is done, the next thing I usually do is go through everything, keep the good clips on V3, keep the okay clips on V1, and maybe place clips I might want to use later on V2. For now, I’m keeping all the vertical clips here. The story makes sense in my head now. Since we did the assembly in chronological order, the clips are also in chronological order, so I’ll just mix them up a little bit. The next part is tricky because it defines how well we do edit-wise, so I’ll go to Epidemic Sound. They have an assistant feature that works similarly to chatbots like ChatGPT or Claude.
I saw some past projects had rock music and good vibes, so I’ll just search for rock music. The assistant goes through all the tracks and selects the best ones. What I’m basically looking for is some initial beat so it starts slow and then drops, allowing us to do one effect in the starting seconds and another effect when the final reveal happens. The song is long, but our edit will be short, and there’s an option to edit the song right here using the ‘adapt length’ feature. This gives you an editable music timeline where you can move sections around. The good thing about this track is that there’s a beat drop near the start, which is perfect for the intro, but the next section is a little monotonous. I can replace the verse with a bridge and delete the verse audio. This is perfect because we have the first drop for normal construction, the bridge ends right where we can show the final output, and then after the chorus, I want the outro. The best part is when I move sections, the audio transition is seamless; I think some AI is working behind it to mix it up. I can delete everything else and create a track that matches our clip duration.
Audio editing used to take so much time, so I really like this feature. I’ll add the track to the timeline. We can mix things up with some close-up shots. I’m speeding up the clips that we previously slowed down to normal pace, and then we’ll add an immediate speed ramp. If a clip is reversed, you can’t directly add a speed ramp; you have to nest it first, which is basically just grouping. To add a speed ramp, I right-click, go to time remapping, and select speed. This bar controls the speed; I want it to start slow on the first beat and then pick up on the second beat. I’ll take the pen tool, click to add a point, and drag the bar up significantly, then add another point to reduce the speed afterward. To fix the abrupt look, we use handles to smooth the motion into curves instead of linear lines. This clip starts slow so people have time to read the logo, and right where it speeds up, we’ll transition to another clip that starts fast and then slows down. I’m almost done with the intro and speed ramps, and around the main beat drop, I want to create a cool transition. I want to remember what I created previously for this client because we’ll use similar vertical clips, and I don’t want it to be exactly the same. In a previous video, I did a vertical effect where three clips appear one by one on successive beats.
For the next beat, we can mask out the machine so it flashes in over the effect. We’ll find three good vertical clips and place them right next to the beats so they drop in rhythm. Then we’ll duplicate the clip and cut out the machine using the new object mask tool in Premiere, which automatically selects the person and the machine. I’ll move the mask to opacity, delete the bottom layer, and animate the position down using keyframes with an ease-in effect. For the flash effect, I’ll add a tint to make it white so that the background comes in right on the beat to create a cool effect. I’m done with the rough edit. Right around the beat before the reveal, I built up a section where the shots become tighter and tighter, cutting between just a few frames so each clip gets about three frames before a white flash effect leads into the drone clips. The next section is sound design. I’ll open the Epidemic Sound extension, where you can perform a complete sound design with a single click by describing what you want in the studio tab. It encodes and uploads the sequence, analyzes all the cuts and changes, and generates a complete sound design timeline inside the extension.
It adds a soundtrack as well, which I’ll mute, and then I can import all the sound effects directly onto the Premiere timeline. Putting this together manually usually takes a long time, but this gives me a great starting point in just a few seconds. I’ll still go ahead and make manual adjustments using the extension, but it’s super cool for projects like this. The only thing left after this is color correction and minor adjustments, where I create an adjustment layer to add some zoom and camera movement to make it more dynamic before sharing it with the client. I spent several hours on this project to earn 12,000 rupees. Most client projects are like this—very boring footage where the task is to make it look presentable. Let me know if you would like to see more of this, and don’t forget to subscribe. That being said, here is the final output. If you want to learn how to source freelance projects like this one, here is my complete Fiverr tutorial video for you
