Postgraduate Course in Video Editing

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With a completely practical approach and a clear commitment to graphic innovation, on the Postgraduate Course in Video Editing you will learn all the expressive resources used in today's audiovisual editing.

  • Creativity
  • Narrative creation
  • Post-production

Informative session

Find out all the details of the program from the academic management

Date: Monday 12 June, 2023

Time: 10:30h

Location: Online

Language: Spanish

Next edition

Classes start: 16 October, 2023

Classes end: 21 May, 2024 (To be confirmed)

Program ends: 28 June, 2024 (To be confirmed)

Modality

On-campus

Language

Spanish

ECTS credits

30

Schedule

Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 6 pm to 9 pm.

Price

6000 €

The Postgraduate Course in Video Editing is a program in which you will learn to create pieces with which you are capable of transmitting the message you want to communicate. The main objective is that you learn to build audiovisual narratives.

Learn to create stories from the images and discover how, sometimes, the script is changed in the editing, or how the editor helps an actor to win an award. Master the language and tools necessary for video editing thanks to this course. At the end of the course you will be able to assemble pieces of high creative value for the film industry and digital media (films, video clips, trailers, adverts, etc.). Become a creative professional specialized in audiovisual editing.

The Postgraduate Course in Video Editing is endorsed by Pompeu Fabra University, the 1st Spanish university and the 15th best university in the world (of those with less than 50 years), according to the Times Higher Education ranking. In addition, UPF Barcelona School of Management has EQUIS accreditation, the most prestigious institutional recognition for business schools globally.

Why choose this program

01

Study at an accredited school

Study at a school accredited by EQUIS, an international distinction that guarantees the quality of our institution and makes us the 1st school of management linked to a public university with this accreditation in our country.

02

Master the tools

With this postgraduate course you delve into the management of the main image and sound editing programs: Premiere, Pro Tools, After Effects, and Da Vinci.

03

Get to know the new audiovisual formats

The postgraduate program specializes in the new formats of the world of cinema, TV and the Internet and deals with formats such as narrative films, essay films or documentaries, and music clips through the editing of other people's images (found-footage) or our own.

04

Learn from an expert teacher

You will be trained by prestigious editors and filmmakers such as Ana Pfaff, Diana Toucedo, Ariadna Ribas, Carla Simón, Fernando Franco or Carlos Marqués-Marcet, and you will be able to edit raw material from their projects.

Who is it for?

The Postgraduate Course in Video Editing is aimed at graduates who wish to acquire specialized knowledge in editing, especially those from degrees such as Audiovisual Communication, Journalism, Advertising, Fine Arts, and Design.

Admission and enrolment
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Curriculum

The course is structured in different blocks for the different elements of video editing: creation and composition, how to work with narrative (fiction), use of After Effects, associative editing, collage, sound and colour. During the postgraduate year, each student has a computer at their disposal in the classroom and the classes have a theoretical-practical nature, with continuous and tutored weekly practices that allow them to deepen the technical, conceptual, and creative aspects of editing.

Narrative editing

Work methodologies and workflows
Ideation and composition

1. The editor
- The trade
- Film editing vs audiovisual editing
- The position of the editor in a production

2. Methodology in the editing room. The assistant editor and the editor. Software used: Premiere.

- Analysis of the typology of the projects and possible methodologies.

- Discovering the workflow that best suits our project

- The post-production of a film, documentary, television programme, advert, series, video clip, etc.

- The apprenticeship through Premiere. Basic functions.

- Management of materials (backups and project), the organization in external hard drives, RAIDs, or servers.

- Technical problems before starting: formats, codecs, transfers, shaping, etc.

- Organization of materials, sequencing, synchronization, etc.

- The structure of the timeline for post-production, etc.

- Communication between departments: AAF’s, OMF’s, XML’s, EDL’s, etc. The closing of production and the final shaping.

*This block will be accompanied by practising the editing of fiction.

3. Narrative and continuity editing. Classical writing and structures through editing. The construction of characters, space, time, and rhythm through emotion. Word and dialogues. Action and psychological space. The script and its staging.

4. Discontinuous, expressive editing of relationships and other modern writing. Work on documentaries. The construction of reality.

5. Creative processes in the editing room, reviewing images, detecting their potential, and sculpting. A new rewrite, the editing of relations

Narrative creation
Fiction

Introduction to the creative process, aesthetic reflection, and the practice of editing. Through practical and analytical experimentation, the editing of fiction or narrative continuity is worked on using raw materials from movie sequences.

Each practice is accompanied by views, comments, and corrections. In class, film fragments are also analysed in relation to questions that come up from the practices.

Through editing we work on the narrative writing, the creation of emotions, the construction of characters, the interpretive direction of the actors, the temporal and spatial organization, the rhythm, the ellipsis, the dialogues, the soundscape or the expression of ideas or concepts through images. In parallel, aesthetic issues of editing are studied in relation to visual thinking.

1. The value of viewing and selecting raw materials.

-Compose sequences in editing according to narrative ideas and formal criteria (rhythm, ellipsis, spatial, and sound creation)

2. The creation of emotions through editing. Walter Murch's Rule of Six

3. Continuity editing: narrative writing through editing.

-Point of view.
-Thinking of a sequence from experience and subjectivity.
-Creation of characters.
-Interpretive construction of the actor.
-Possibilities and aesthetic modulations of the plane/counter plane.
-Microstructure and macrostructure
-Associative editing within continuity editing: rhymes
-Character/actor match cuts.
-Rhythm.
-Ellipse.
-Thinking and representation of actions.
-Organization of space.
-Invention and expression of time.
-Parallel editing

Parallel practices: Después también (Carla Simón), Hierro (TV series), Avatar (short), Que Dios nos perdone (Rodrigo Sorogoyen), Júlia Ist (Elena Martín)

Technical programs

Graphic composition
After Effects

In this subject, we will work from the most basic level of After Effects to more advanced aspects of the program. The workshop is designed so that students learn the basic tools of the program and acquire the necessary skills to be able to comfortably carry out exercises in other subjects (such as Animated Collage). It also includes basic notions of Photoshop, which we will use to prepare the material that we will later animate with After Effects.

CONTENTS:

1. PHOTOSHOP (2 hours in the second session)

- Introduction to the program: Interface and tools

- Selection, clipping and cloning tools. Masks. Layers.

2. AFTER EFFECTS (19 hours)

Introduction to the program. Interface and resources

- Basic notions: layers, properties, keyframes

- Masks

- Matching layers

- Processing a project: formats and codecs

Trimming and manipulating video images

- The rotoscopy brush

- Track mattes

- Effects

- Time: time remapping, freeze frame.

2D character animation - Puppet tool. The 3D environment in After Effects

- 3D layers

- Cameras. Typologies. Shallow depth of field

- Light

Advanced After Effects

- Basic expressions

- Null object and adjustment layers

Text

- Basic work with typography.

- Animated text

Painting stills frame by frame - Brush tool and paint panel

PRACTICE AND FINAL PROJECT

In each session, we will carry out a practice that contains the class syllabus. The practices will have to be delivered finished at the end of the class or, if there has not been sufficient time, on Monday of the following week.

Each student will carry out a final project that will be presented finished in the last session. It will consist of making a short clip (maximum 30 seconds) of a topic to be specified.

Sound
Sound workshop. Protools
  • Basic parameters: Elementary notions of acoustics. Electro-acoustics and physics of sound.
  • What is sound?
  • The sound wave: how it behaves and how to manipulate it
  • Amplitude, frequency, height, and timbre
  • Direct sound, reflected sound.
  • Absorption, reflection, and reverberation.
  • Creating sounds in Pro Tools 10
  • Parameters
  • Creating tracks, naming them, deleting them.
  • Saving sessions, locating them and opening them.
  • Importing files
  • Entrances and exits, peripherals.
  • Sample rate, audio formats, and time codes.
  • Basic editing techniques
  • Handling editing modes
  • Cut, paste, drag, fade, crossfades, zoom, pencil.
  • Sound editing
  • Dialogue editing
  • Noise reducers
  • The Room Tone
  • The effects of shooting
  • Creating atmospheres
  • International band - M&E
  • Music
  • Mix
  • Binaurality, panning, envelopment.
  • Levels.
  • Plug-in management. Audiosuite, in real-time.
  • Equalization, dynamics, modulations, effects.
Colour
Colour workshop. DaVinci

Correctly balance a sequence of images with the DaVinci program using the Vectorscope and the program tools (shaping, offline reference, nodes, key nodes, tracks, resize, render).

  • Introduction to colour
  • The art of colouring
  • DaVinci interface
  • Primary correction
  • Secondary correction
  • Tracking, stabilizer
  • Nodes and grades
  • Look with visual comparison
  • Formats
  • Render

Associative editing

Associative and discontinuity editing
Association and essay
  • Associative editing: conceptual, lyrical, essayistic.
  • The image as a relationship of images. The cinema in the head of the spectator.
  • The poetic image. The cinematic vision. The visible and the invisible.
  • Creation of metaphors, rhymes, and visual ideas.
  • Ideological editing typologies (metric, rhythmic, tonal, harmonic)
  • Remote editing.
  • Research, documentation, and expression of an idea using images. Visual archives.
  • Aesthetics of editing from texts and work by Jean-Luc Godard, Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, José Val del Omar Artavazd Pelechian, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Chris Marker, David Perlov, Peter Watkins, Adam Curtis, Harun Farocki, Frederick Wiseman, and Hito Steyerl among others.
  • Practice: associative/essay editing exercises (conceptual, voice/word, musical).
Writing in the first person

1. Writing in the first person

-A historical approach to writing in the first person

-Possible ethical, aesthetic and epistemological repercussions of the subjective documentary

Me-filmmakers: diaries, autobiographies, self-portraits, filmed letters, correspondence, film essay, travel notebook, family cinema, self-fiction, ...

-First-person montage: ideas and emotions

-The meeting place between reality and the filmmaker's memory

-Distance and time management

-What is "home cinema"?

2. Practice: a documentary piece of domestic cinema based on materials from Yourlostmemories.com and the student's materials. Maximum duration 10 min.

The student will work on the materials provided to create a film in the first person, addressing the domestic environment and the experience of time spent in it. In class we will work:

-The organization of the material according to the creation of the script. How to read and write with pictures.

-Inquire into the formal concept of the project and our mode of expression in a montage (types of montages).

-The story: shaping reality and fiction.

-The subject-object dialogue, the openness to the three times (past, present and future) and their exchange (I, you, him). Identity as an inter-subjective expression.

-Voice off or text.

-The sound, its value and potentialities.

-Structures and macrostructures, is our work alive?
 

New narratives
  • Value the relevance of online narratives and understand what role they play in relation to the audiovisual industry and conventional narratives
  • Analyse and understand changes in the audiovisual industry and consumption in the second decade of the 21st century
  • Analyse and understand through case studies how public or audience success can be predicted and virality built in an organic and extendible way
  • Work individual and group brainstorming techniques to create and screen ideas and empower the student as a potential creator from self-production
     
Archive editing and manipulation of images
Found footage and collage

 

Get to know films and, through their techniques, typologies, and uses, approach the expressive possibilities of appropriation or found-footage and collage editing.

1. Introduction to found-footage and collage cinema.
 - A cinema without a camera. The appropriation and creation of the discourse. The deviation of meaning.
- An inheritance from the avant-garde (collage, ready-made, photomontage, avant-garde cinema, Soviet cinema).
- A crisis of concepts: unique and original work, and authorship.
- The recycling of images within film production.
- From celluloid to the internet.

2. Editing as an artistic principle, a new meaning for images.
- Horizontal editing and vertical editing. A new narrative. Shock editing, interval. The referentiality of the images and the degree of being recognizable. Mimicking the MRI edit. Formal or narrative echoes. Repetition, rhythm, and change of speeds. Composition within the frame, overlays, working with layers.

3. Typologies and uses in found-footage and collage cinema.
- Criticism and subversion. Poetic-oneiric cinema. Amateur or family cinema. Cinema that talks about cinema. The filmic essay.
- Fiction and non-fiction, experimental practice, video clip, advertising, etc.
      4. Image manipulation techniques.
- Frame by frame animation (stop motion): cut-out, painted, live-action.
- Optical compositions from the camera.
- Optical manipulation of the frame: working with the optical printer.
- Physical manipulation of the frame (the importance of the support, the celluloid): torn, painted, frame within the frame. Physico-chemical interventions. Alchemy. The loss of the referent in the image.
- Manipulation within the electronic image (video signal, chroma and its precedents).
- Manipulation on the frame (digital): layers, masks, rotoscopy, effects, composition, data moshing, the inheritance of analogue techniques, etc.

 5. Processes in the realization of a piece with archive material.
- Search for the material: Archives or image banks. The history of cinema (and TV) as an archive. Internet.
- Selection and classification of the material: first the image or first the idea. Unification or diversification of the type of material at a plastic level (origin, format, style, period, texture, etc.)
- Technical processes in celluloid or digital. Unification of formats, degree of manipulation, and final copy.
- The building of discourse.
- Plastic elements and degree of image manipulation. Composition, rhythm, speed, continuity, or fragmentation, (false) transparency or shock, visual rhymes, etc.

6. File sources.

Creating your own film

Ideation and materialization of an edited film
Postgraduate final project

The Postgraduate Final Project deals with a topic related to the program and one or more of its subjects. The student has the support of a tutor to carry out the work and an expert who validates it, if applicable, once it is finished.
This work is individual. In it, you must apply the knowledge acquired and put your editing skills into practice by creating your own piece (free format). The presentation and the final viewing transmit the results of this work to the rest of the students. Likewise, if the author or authors allow it, the Postgraduate Final Project will be part of the TFMs/TFPs digital repository.


 

Complementary activities

The Postgraduate Course in Video Editing also includes the possibility of participating in practical activities and activities for personal and professional growth such as:

  • UPF-BSM Inside: is a group of interdisciplinary subjects (applied data, communication, creativity, innovation and project management, sustainability and leadership among others) that, if you take this program, you can access at no additional cost. They are 100% online and you can take them throughout the academic year at your own pace, as they have been designed as self-study subjects.

Qualification obtained

Once you have passed the program, you will be awarded an electronic degree (e-Título) for the Diploma de Postgrado en Edición de Video y Montaje Audiovisual, issued by the Pompeu Fabra University.

Faculty

Our expert faculty is made up of film directors, screenwriters, editors, filmmakers and sound engineers. Some of them with numerous films behind them.

Academic directors

Gonzalo de Lucas Abril
Gonzalo de Lucas Abril

Associate Professor UPF

Methodology

The methodology applied in this program combines, on the one hand, theoretical and technical classes on editing programs and, on the other, practical application through projects on different types of editing.

01.

Fully practical approach

During the postgraduate course, you will carry out individual projects on different types of editing to put into practice the acquired knowledge: creation of a small visual documentary, putting into practice colours and sound in small visual pieces. They must be done outside of teaching hours in order to make the most of the classes.

02.

Professionally active teaching staff in the sector

Your teachers are directors, screenwriters, and editors; all of them with extensive professional experience.

03.

Use of specific tools

You will learn to use video and sound editing programs so that you can work from the first moment: Photoshop, After Effects, DaVinci, ProTools, etc.

Evaluation

Continuous assessment focused on the students' editing, with a review of the work and practices carried out by the students in each of the subjects, as well as in the final project.

Tools

Project-oriented learning and the combination of lectures and active methodologies such as case studies, flipped learning, solving real problems and professional simulations allow the student to connect theory and practice, acquire advanced skills and achieve learning which is transferable to work.

You will have:

  • Master's Final Project (TFM) or  Postgrad Final Project (TFP)
  • A personal mentor to monitor your final project (TFM or TFP)
  • Digital resources to achieve transversal skills
  • Interdisciplinary activities and workshops

Professional Future

With 10 courses behind it, the Postgraduate in Audiovisual Editing guides you to become a video editor capable of adapting to the technical requirements of a film, a documentary, or a television advert. You will be able to work your creativity guided by the best filmmakers and creatives, so that you never stop creating and you can turn your passion into your profession.

Student profile

Most of the course students come from Audiovisual Communication studies, although you can also coincide with students from different academic courses such as Journalism, Fine Arts, and different Social and Humanistic Sciences. Most of them with professional experience in full development.

28

Average age

4

Average number of years of professional experience

8%

International students

Career opportunities

This course is focused on specific training to be able to edit videos and participate in the post-production of films, documentaries, or other elements of audiovisual communication. It does not include an internship option due to its eminently practical orientation of learning by doing. If you want to do an internship, you should do it on your own and our professional careers department will help you with the agreement.


  • Audiovisual editing professional
  • Professional post-production of any audiovisual work and format
  • Director of audiovisual projects and digital creator

Admission and enrolment

Our admission process consists of a rigorous evaluation of each application to preserve the quality of the group as well as the training, experience, and work capacity of all students.

Who can apply?

You will need a higher university degree to be able to apply.

Other candidates without the required university degree may take part in the selection process by virtue of their academic or professional merits and the place of work they occupy.

Those participants who do not have Spanish as one of their mother tongues or who did not have it as a teaching language in their training studies, must prove that they have at least a B2 level of Spanish (Common European Framework of Reference), as well as fluently take part in a personal interview with the academic director, if necessary.

How to apply?

To apply for admission to this program, students must read and accept the Terms and Conditions of Contract once they start the application for admission through the following form.

Application for admission

Complete your application within the next admission rounds:

RoundApplication deadlineAdmission resolution
1024/05/202309/06/2023
1114/06/202329/06/2023
1222/06/202307/07/2023

Applications for admission will be evaluated when you complete the following steps:

  • Complete the online admission form.
  • Pay the €120 admission fee. This amount will be returned if you are not admitted.
  • Send the following documents through the online platform e-registrar:
    • Presentation letter or video
    • CV
    • Scanned copy of university degree (if you are in the last year of your degree, you can provide your academic records)
    • Scanned copy of Transcript of Records. Make sure that it includes your GPA (Grade Point Average)
    • Scanned copy of ID Card or Passport
    • Passport-size photo (jpg format)

Additional documents may be requested in certain cases.
Application rounds are subject to the number of places available on the program.

Admission

  • The Admissions Committee will select the candidates on the basis of a personal or CV-based interview.
  • You will be notified of the admission decision in writing.

Enrolment

  • Registration must be paid within a 15 days after the admission.
  • Once the letter of acceptance to the program has been received, you will need to submit the following original documents before the course begins:
    • Stamped and/or authenticated photocopy of your university degree.
  • If you have a foreign degree you may need to submit additional documents.
  • Paying the reservation fee (25% of the program's tuition fees) is essential in order to reserve your place
  • If you pay the tuition fees by bank transfer you will be required to introduce the program code. The program code for this course is 2942.
  • The remaining tuition fees must be paid 2 weeks before the start of the course.

Grants, scholarships and financing

Scholarships

The UPF Barcelona School of Management offers you different means of financing so that you can take any of our programs without worry. We offer you the opportunity to finance part of your program, either by rewarding your talent through scholarships, through grants from entities dedicated to promoting education or through collaboration agreements with financial entities.

Grants and discounts

Funding

Financing simulator

You can choose how to finance your studies by consulting our simulator and receive an answer in less than 24 hours.

Go to the simulator

Collaborating entities

We collaborate with various entities which provide study loans on favorable terms. For more information you can contact any of the following links. 

Postgraduate Course in Video Editing

APPLY FOR ADMISSIONREQUEST INFORMATION