Interview of Kevin P McAuliffe, three-time North American ProMax Award Winning Editor

Kevin shares his professional journey with us.

 

Kevin McAuliffe interview conforming in davinci resolve

Kevin P McAuliffe is one of the leading names in the Editing industry. Apart from professional editor, he is also an enthusiastic teacher. Check out major points of the interview.


Hi Kevin, thanks for joining us. What has been your educational background?

I actually started out my television education in high school, where I attended Stephen Leacock Collegiate in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. At the time, it was one of only two high schools that had a television studio in it (keep in mind that this was 30 years ago). There I learned everything from directing to live audio, to editing and everything else it took to put together a live, daily news show for the school.

From there I attended Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, specializing in Media Arts, specifically editing, and upon graduating, I started working at the Discovery Channel as an assistant editor.

How you geared towards Editing? Or did it occur eventually during your professional journey?

When I took a tour of Sheridan College before I actually enrolled, I saw probably the coolest thing I had ever seen. A D-Vision non-linear editing system, that was playing back video that was edited on a computer (unheard of at the time). From that point on I was hooked!

What are your major professional credentials?

I’ve worked for a lot of companies doing a lot of offlining and onlining shows including the Discovery Channel, The Sports Network (TSN), HGTV Canada and Life Network Canada. Right now, I work for a company Called Extreme Reach in Toronto, Canada, with our client base that includes Warner Bros. Canada, The Walt Disney Company, Universal Pictures and Elevation Pictures, just to name a few.

You have created tons of video content during your long phase of trainer profile. Kindly let us know in detail about it. 

When I started out, I was editing half hour and hour long shows, and as my career progressed, I moved onto working on shorter content like commercials. Now, I spend most of my days doing effects work (tracking, effects matching) for language versioning for the major studios. I also do a lot of formatting for social media, which has really taken off in the last few years.

During your job role as a trainer, how were you managing various activities like keeping yourself ahead in latest developments, continuous student evaluation, creation of new project files and many other related Academic and Management operations? 

For me, it’s always been a matter of knowing people at all the major companies out there, so that I can keep myself on the team that gets first looks at new products coming out, or on Beta programs so that I can work with software first, before it gets out to the public. Having a hand in shaping what products are like gives me a unique perspective and also let’s me begin to prep new courses, so the day the software hits the market, new training is ready to go.

In your professional tenure, you worked with many companies. They all will have their own workflow and pipeline. How you dealt with it?

It’s all about templates. No matter which application I’m working in, whether it’s After Effects, Media Encoder or even Media Composer, it’s all about setting up templates, so that whichever project I’m working on, it can simply be dropped into a specific pipeline, and I know that all the files will be formatted a certain way, transcoded and imported correctly, and even exported the correct way every time.

According to you, what is Editing?

I always liken editing to building a puzzle. Normally when you start, you have all the pieces in front of you. It’s a matter of unjumbling the pieces to put together something that flows and makes sense. 

Please share in details the tips and tricks to become a perfect Editor.

The best tip I can give for someone to be the “perfect editor”, it’s to remember that half of editing is knowing how to edit. The other half is knowing how to deal with the person sitting in the chair beside you (Director, Producer, Client, etc).

Which were your most challenging projects and how you tackled them successfully?

Every project presents it’s share of challenges, but one thing never changes. Organization is the key to getting projects done as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Editors who are disorganized are lost.  

Let us know in detail about your course on Lowepost: Conforming in DaVinci Resolve. 

Kevin McAuliffe interview conforming in davinci resolve

I was very excited about this course. We’ve got over 5 hours of content that is perfect for FCPX, Premiere or Avid Editors to get the jump on conforming their edits inside of Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve. Whether they’re trying to roundtrip their project from their NLE to Resolve and back again, or just looking to get a more in-depth look at conforming techniques inside of DaVinci Resolve, this course is perfect for editors new to Resolve, and seasoned Resolve users alike.

The courseware teaches from confirming various medias to the final output in 22 lessons. Check out full details of the course

What are your next goals?

There is always great new courses coming to Lowepost.com, and right now I’m very excited about a Fairlight course that I’m working on. More and more editors are wearing multiple hats, including audio mixing, and hopefully this course will give them the knowledge and confidence to handle their own audio mixing, to not only save themselves time and money, but also to make themselves more marketable to their clients.


The Virtual Assist thanks Kevin to take out time from his busy production schedule for this interview and wish his all the success for his future endeavours.

 

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