The Healthy Edit: Creative Editing Techniques for Perfecting Your Movie

This updated and revised new edition of The Healthy Edit provides aspiring and working editors with creative editing strategies they can employ to enhance a film, while also overcoming common production problems. With decades of experience editing and film doctoring Hollywood features, author John Rosenberg reveals both the aesthetic and technical aspects of the editor’s art, demonstrating tricks and techniques for nursing an ailing project back to health or enhancing a well one. Whether it's a bad performance from an actor, a hole in the story or script, a continuity or pacing issue, or a poorly-composed shot, every film or show we watch encounters challenges during production―and fixing these issues becomes the job of the editor.

Utilizing an approach comparing film editing to medicine, working editor and professor John Rosenberg offers a software-agnostic guide to best editing practices, offering solutions to everything from story and script inconsistencies to genre-specific structural issues. Accessibly written and brought fully up-to-date to embrace the predominance of file-based digital production, this second edition offers new insights into ultra-high-resolution footage, transitions, visual effects, collaboration, sound and music editing, as well as highlighting historic advances in the art form.

John Rosenberg is a Hollywood-based film editor and professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where he teaches the aesthetics of motion picture editing. He attended UC Berkeley and UCLA, graduating with honors from the film school. As an editor, Rosenberg is credited on nearly three dozen feature films, including Prancer, Mannequin: On the Move , Playmaker, The Convent, and Brush with Danger―as well as television (Gift of Fear and National Geographic’s Expeditions from the Edge)―for such companies as 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, Orion, New Line, and Artisan. He is the author of the award winning novel, Tincture of Time (2012).