With a completely practical approach, a clear commitment to graphic innovation and designed for an international audience, on the Postgraduate Course in Video Editing you will learn all the expressive resources used in today's audiovisual editing.
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
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.
Master the tools
With this postgraduate course you delve into the management of the main image and sound editing programs: Premiere, Avid, Pro Tools, After Effects, and Da Vinci.
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 or AI edition technologies through the editing of other people's images (found-footage) or our own.
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.
Curriculum
The course is structured into different sections aimed at various aspects of video editing: creation and composition, narrative work (fiction), After Effects usage, associative editing, collage, sound, and color. Throughout the postgraduate year, each student has access to a computer in the classroom, and the classes have a theoretical-practical nature, with continuous and supervised weekly practices that allow for a deeper understanding of the technical, conceptual, and creative aspects of editing.
Narrative editing
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
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 MartÃn)
Technical programs
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.
- 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.
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 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).
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?
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- 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
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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
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.
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Note on the Curriculum
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 receive the following electronic degree certification (eTÃtulo©): Specialization diploma in Video Editing and Audiovisual Editing, awarded by Pompeu Fabra University. The eTÃtulo© will be issued in Catalan, Spanish and English.
The electronic degree certification (eTÃtulo© ) is an authentic digital degree, issued in pdf format and electronically signed, with the same legal validity as if it were in paper format.
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
Collaborating faculty
- Aleix Abellanet Ventura
Graphic Designer - Sergi Camerón
Director, producer and editor.
He currently co-directs the Nanouk Films production company. - Núria Esquerra
She combines film editing with programming.
Lecturer on the Master program in Creative Documentary at Pompeu Fabra University.
She edited films including: En construcción, En la ciudad de Sylvia and Correspondencia Jonas Mekas-José Luis Guerin, by José Luis Guerin; Veinte años no es nada and Más allá del espejo, by Joaquim Jordà , and Cuchillo de Palo, by Renate Costa. - Fernando Franco
Filmmaker and Editor.
Head of the Montage speciality at Madrid's Cinematography and Audiovisual School. - Carlos Marqués-Marcet
Filmmaker, screenwriter and editor.
Master in Film Directing at the UCLA School of Film and Television.
He has made short films such as Yellow Ribbon, which was awarded at various festivals and by the association of North American Directors, the prestigious DGA, and the feature film 10,000 Km (Award for Best Film at the Malaga Film Festival, Goya for Best New Director, and Gaudà for Best Director, among others). In addition to his own projects, he has extensive experience as an editor. He is a founding member of La Panda Productions. - Ana Pfaff
https://cargocollective.com/anapfaff
Freelance in cinema and audiovisual staging.
Graduated in cinema and audiovisuals from ESAC - Ariadna Ribas
https://www.ariadnars.com/
Editor for projects on cinema, documentary, television, advertising, video clip, videodance and other experimentation formats.
Graduated in Cinema and Audiovisual Means, specializing in Montage from ESCAC. - Jordi Ribas SurÃs
Sound engineer (direct sound and post-production) of cinema and audiovisuals.
Sound teacher at ESCAC.
He has worked on various feature films as head of sound and sound designer as well as for documentaries, plays, art projects, and advertising.
He has participated in practically all the projects of the filmmaker and artist Albert Serra and has also collaborated with directors such as Mar Coll or Marçal Forés, among others. - Carla Simón
Director and screenwriter. Â
Her first feature film was Estiu 1993 (2017), a film that won numerous international awards (best debut feature at the Berlinale 2017, Biznaga de Oro, Best Director at the BAFICI, etc.) and for which she won the Goya for Best New Director and Gaudà for best film, direction, and script, among others. Alcarràs is her second feature film in development, chosen in development laboratories such as the Torino Film Lab (where she won the CNC award), the Cannes Residency, and the Nipkow program. In 2020 Carla Simón was awarded the CoNCA National Prize for Culture. - Diana Toucedo
https://dianatoucedo.com/
Film Editor and Director.
Lecturer at ESCAC and Pompeu Fabra University.
She worked for two years at the Estudio Mariscal in the editing of the animation film Chico y Rita (2010) together with Arnau Quiles. Together with Isaki Lacuesta, she edited In Between days (2009) and La noche que no acaba (2010), which won the award for best documentary of the year at the Spanish Film Festival of Toulouse (2011). - Lara Vilanova
Colourist and director of photography. - Gloria Vilches
Coordinator at the Audiovisual Department of the Contemporary Culture Centre Barcelona (CCCB).
PhD in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Valencia.
She gave film production classes at the University of Valencia.
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.
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.
Professionally active teaching staff in the sector
Your teachers are directors, screenwriters, and editors; all of them with extensive professional experience.
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.
Average age
Average number of years of professional experience
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