About Me

This blog is the work of Steve Cohen. I’m a motion picture editor working in Los Angeles. You can check out my credits here.

Though I began my career using traditional film tools, in the early 90s I worked closely with Montage, Ltd. and then with Avid Technology, helping them build a user interface and feature set that would be effective for people like me. I’m very proud of the part I played in developing what was to become the gold standard for professional editing.

During that time, I edited the first studio feature to use the Media Composer (“Lost in Yonkers“) and the first TV movie that used an Avid to conform a film negative (“Teamster Boss“). I also wrote a book called “Avid Media Composer Techniques and Tips,” which was very popular back then and which is still used by many editors as a reference. You can check it out here.

In the late ’90s I was the chairman of the editing department at the American Film Institute Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies, one of the only schools in the world that offers a Master’s Degree in motion picture editing.

From 2000 to 2004 I helped create, and then became the publisher of, the Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine.

I’ve won various awards over the years including an Emmy for “LBJ: The Early Years” and an A.C.E. Eddy for “Don King: Only in America.” In 2007, I received the American Cinema Editors’ Robert Wise Award for “journalistic illumination of the art of editing.”

I’m using this site to continue the dialog that I began with the Editors Guild Magazine, namely to talk about the current state of motion media and its effects on work and life.