COOKED
Editing is entirely screen-based, and the volume tiers of the work — logging footage, syncing audio, transcript-driven rough cuts, captioning, reframing for vertical, basic color and audio cleanup, cutting 40 social variants from one master — are already handled well by Premiere/Resolve AI features and text-based editors. What survives is narrative judgment: pacing a scene so it lands emotionally, structuring a documentary from 200 hours of unscripted material, and sitting in a room with a director or client absorbing vague notes and turning them into a cut. The modal editor today does more corporate, social, and promo work than feature narrative, and that modal work is exactly the part collapsing in price.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. A 9 sits mid-band because the assembly layer — ingest, multicam sync, transcript-based stringouts, subtitle burn-in, 9:16 reframes, loudness normalization to -14 LUFS — is now a menu command, while structuring a 45-minute unscripted episode from mismatched interview coverage and finding the one reaction shot that makes a beat work still requires someone watching every frame and deciding what it means.
Fully desk- and screen-based. A 4, not 0, only because you still physically handle drives, LTO pulls, and reference monitors in a calibrated suite and occasionally sit on set for on-location assembly — but nothing in the job requires leaving a desk with a keyboard, tablet, and two displays.
No licence, no signature requirement. There is no licence, no board, and no exam for editing; the E&O policy and the delivery contract sit with the producer or post house, so a botched cut costs you the next gig, not your right to practice.
Some relationship component. An 8 reflects that directors and showrunners rehire the specific editor who already knows their taste and can read "it feels flat around the middle" — but on branded, corporate, and social work you're a line item on a rate card, replaced between projects without a conversation.
Meaningful discretion. A 10 covers the real discretion in pacing, structure, and what a documentary subject's on-camera contradiction is allowed to imply — but the director, showrunner, or client approves the cut before it ships, so the ambiguous high-stakes call is theirs to sign off on.
Has AI actually changed your work?