The art of video editing

Do you ever watch a video and realize at the end that your jaw had literally dropped at the transitions and special effects of the video? Well, the person behind all of the astonishing elements is a video editor, an occupation that 22-year-old Brandon Starchuk, better known as Liffeh, finds a lot of joy in.

A video editor generally binds together pre-existing video clips to create a promising final product. Liffeh works for Twitch Streamers, a livestreaming platform in which people can broadcast themselves playing video games. From there, he “creates highlights of these people’s streams to put on their YouTube channels.”

Liffeh, who grew up knowing that he wanted to pursue a career in media, “geared a lot of [his] courses in high school towards going into graphic design”. However, despite all the experience in that category, he ultimately decided that it was not for him. He then turned to his love for video games– specifically Call of Duty– and from there, learned to edit videos and now has been going on at it for the past six years.

In Liffeh’s perspective, the best part of the job are the comments left on his videos.

“I love to read the comments on the videos I’ve helped create. Seeing the criticism, the good and the bad is what makes me want to get better,” Liffeh said. He then continued on with how he takes note of criticism in hopes that he could improve on the flaws.

On top of video editing, Liffeh also juggles a day job with varying hours and school.

“Finding time to sit down and edit for a while isn’t exactly the easiest thing to do,” Liffeh said, although he tries to edit as much as he can when he’s at home. However, working from home can be distracting, Liffeh admitted, then joked that there are “too many cat videos to watch.”

Fortunately, video editing is one of those jobs where the good overcomes the bad.

“I love my job, I get to do what I love for a living. Isn’t that the dream everyone’s working towards?” Liffeh said. “Sure, there’s some real annoying things that editors got to deal with, but the positives totally outweighs the negatives.”