Natalie Gerber

Video Editor
Hollywood, CA USA

Cutting Reality

Natalie Gerber graduated from Los Angeles Film School in 2005 and started her editing career for Alera Enterprises, based in Los Angeles, as Assistant Editor on the 'Overhaulin' reality-TV car show on TLC, then as Editor. Natalie has recently been promoted to Senior Editor at Alera and is now working on the reality-TV show 'Living with Ed' starring Ed Begley Jr. that airs on the Discovery 'Planet Green' network.

From Film School to Senior Editor

At the LA Film School we were taught all aspects of the art of film making but I decided that I really loved the editing process most of all and was fortunate to get started with Alera as assistant editor on 'Overhaulin.' I worked very hard on that show and have managed to make my way up to the position of Senior Editor. 

Final Cut

I have always worked with Apple's Final Cut Pro so I know it very well - it was fairly easy to learn. Now I am at the point where it feels very natural to the way I work and lets me concentrate on the artistic side of the editing process.

Artist Control

I've had the Artist Control for a while now and my favorite features are the shortcuts on the dedicated keys and on the screen. With Final Cut you end up doing the same thing over and over and anything to speed up these repetitive tasks is very cool. I like the way I can program my own shortcuts as it lets me origanize them to suit the task at hand – having all my shortcuts on one page is very timesaving, and the ergonomics on my left hand is comfortable. I use a combination of keyboard shortcuts, like 'new bin', tools section - especially the tools that require multiple keys for a single tool, 'paste insert', zoom tools, and favorites such as a 15 frame crossfade. I sometimes use the faders when I need to deal with audio mixing but it's the shortcuts I use most.

Living with Ed

We deliver one episode of 'Living with Ed' each week. The work is on a tight schedule so speed is important but it's critical to ensure that the quality of the editing process is maintained. There are two of us editing each show - we do two acts each then I get the final four acts and finish it off. The show comes in on DVCPro tapes, is digitized to photojpg 720p for editing, we then send the media managed project to an online house for final hi-res output in 1080i for broadcast.