Steve Sarles - Editor

I am a freelance editor in the Boston area.

I've been freelancing since early 2004. Lately I've been using Premiere Pro, but I hope Davinci Resolve takes off. Previously I'd been editing using Final Cut Pro, and I edited on Avid systems since the early nineties — over 13 years. Before that I edited on 16mm and 35mm flatbed, 35mm upright Moviola, Sony RM440 deck controller, and Super 8mm film (if you want to go back to Junior High School).

I've edited a wide variety of television commercials, including :30's, :15's, lifts, a 2 minute national campaign with multiple market versions and even more 800 numbers and legal supers. I've cut new business pitches, brand essence videos, sales meeting presentations, behind the scenes videos, promotional pieces, and interview cut-downs.

[warning: a lot of historical tech terms ahead]

I was fortunate to get into film editing professionally before some big transitions came along. When I started, if a client wanted to see a simple effect, we pulled the negative for the optical house and it would be back in two days. Our final product was a composite print, taken to a telecine suite for overall color adjustment, then audio relayed in the suite. Then someone suggested color correcting the scenes we used and conforming it in an online suite without any kind of list. Next came keycode burn-in and the Sony RM-440 edit controller. And finally, non-linear editing appeared, though it crashed once an hour. Now prepping for a job took a few minutes instead of half a day. Of course, by then I was an editor and there were assistant editors for that (though I frequently did it myself).

My favorite work is editing to music and cutting comedy.

The first step is to keep cutting until "it stops bugging me."

A lot of the job is problem solving. Maybe that's obvious. Maybe not.

I also enjoy enjoy photography, cooking, films, homebrewing, birdwatching, and have been known to randomly spout relevant movie quotes.