Video Editor for Educational YouTube + Shorts — Ongoing, Weekly

Summary I'm Alex Knight. I run a luxury wedding photography studio in New York — about 45–50 weddings a year — and Alex Knight Education, where I teach working wedding photographers the unglamorous half of the business: pricing, systems, and positioning. Real numbers from a real studio, not theory. The written side is already live at learn.alexknightstudio.com. Now I'm launching the video side — a YouTube channel plus vertical clips for Instagram and YouTube Shorts — and I'm looking for one editor to own that output with me, ongoing. What you'd be doing Every week I record two sessions. Each raw file contains two synced recordings: me talking to camera, and my laptop screen (recorded in Screen Studio). I'm usually walking through something real — a pricing breakdown, a workflow inside my studio software, a tool I built. From each session you'd deliver: - One long edit — 16:9 for YouTube. Tightened, cleaned up, cut between the talking head and the screen recording so the viewer is always looking at the right thing. Remove the false starts, the dead air, the "let me try that again." - Three to five vertical clips — 9:16 for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, pulled from that same session, each one able to stand completely on its own. You choose the clips. I'm not going to hand you timestamps. I want an editor who watches the full recording, finds the moments that will actually travel, and tells me why. If you think a section should open the video instead of sitting in the middle — say so, and do it. I'm hiring your judgment, not just your hands. The style bar (please read this part twice) This is a calm, editorial, premium brand. My audience is professional photographers who charge five figures per wedding — they have taste, and they can smell hype instantly. Not this: rapid-fire meme zooms, whoosh sound effects, giant bouncing rainbow captions, arrows and circles everywhere, "WAIT FOR IT," energy-drink pacing. This: confident pacing with breathing room, clean typography, motion that serves comprehension (a zoom because the viewer needs to see the number, a callout because the cursor is small), quiet transitions. Think a well-made documentary explainer, not an ad. Restraint is the whole aesthetic. Brand fonts are Cormorant Garamond (serif) and DM Sans — I'll share the kit. If you have a better instinct for what performs while staying in that lane, I want to hear it. Captions: burned-in for the vertical clips, since most people watch on mute — clean, one or two lines, no karaoke bounce. For the long YouTube edit I'd rather have a subtitle file (.srt) than burned-in text. Workflow - I drop raw files into a shared Google Drive folder; you deliver finished exports back into the same structure. I'll set up the folders and naming. - I record in Screen Studio — but edit in whatever you're fastest in. Premiere, Resolve, Final Cut, CapCut, doesn't matter to me. I care about the output. - Async is fine. I'm in New York; you can be anywhere. No rush turnarounds — I'd rather have a genuinely good edit in a week than a rushed one in a day. - Deliverables: YouTube-ready 16:9 master, 9:16 clips (H.264, 1080×1920), and an .srt for the long edit. Who I'm looking for - You've edited talking-head and screen-recording educational content before — course videos, explainers, business or software channels. Wedding films and vlogs are a different craft; please show me the relevant work. - You can point at clips you selected from long recordings and show that they performed. - You have opinions about hooks and structure, and you're comfortable telling me when something isn't working. - Reliable and communicative. Two sessions a week, every week — consistency matters more than speed. The test project I'll send one real raw session. You deliver one long edit and two vertical clips, plus a couple of sentences on why you picked those two moments. If it's a fit, we move to ongoing weekly work — two sessions a week, invoiced monthly. I'd like this to be a long relationship — I'm building a channel, not filling a one-off gap. To apply Skip the template proposal — I read every one and I can tell. Instead, please: 1. Link two examples of talking-head or screen-recording educational content you edited, ideally one long and one vertical. 2. Tell me, in one or two sentences, what you'd change about how most photography or business educators edit their videos. 3. Confirm your price per session (one long edit + 3–5 clips) and roughly how many days you'd need per session. 4. Start your reply with the word "aperture" so I know you read this far. Please keep all communication on Upwork. Do not contact me outside the platform. Any inquiry that reaches me off Upwork will be automatically rejected — it tells me you didn't read the instructions or follow directions, which is the opposite of what I'm hiring for.