executives and frantic flying stuff when you have only a thin message.  Taste is only rarely the issue.  Most of it's rote and obvious.  When you're a high-power, short attention-span, overscheduled, adrenalin-addicted, control freak producer,  just passively WATCHING this getting tinkered together semi-automatically is torture.  So out of displaced  revenge against a cruel and arbitrary universe, you producers torture the poor editor with silly little unnecessary tweaks to help pass the time.)

4.  The editor works for a fixed price, set before the show is even shot.  This is necessary, not optional. 
It does two things.  Firstly, it helps the producer control and lock in his prices for any particular project.  This is the crucial carrot inducement to give up some of the control to another creative mind.  Secondly, things will not get silly and out of hand in making revisions to the modifications to the changes to the alterations with a flaky producer.  You simply threaten,  with the stick,  to put him back on hourly, and he can fribble away all the time and money he wants.  There go the savings!

It is recognized this model will not fit all producers.  Some will simply not be psychologically able to surrender any control to another creative team member.  Some will badly abuse the unlimited ability to revise.  After sticking to your agreement, and finishing the program for them under the agreed-upon rules till they're unconditionally happy---no matter how long it takes,  you simply never work price-fixed with them again.  (And in our case, never work with them again at all.  This new paradigm isn't voluntary with us.  It's The One True Way we'll do editing business in the future.  Editing for hire is not our core business.  Special effects is.  A little editing in a  "Limited Practice"  for a short list of producers who can delegate is valuable fill-in work for us, but not a crucial profit center.)

We optomistically estimate maybe five to ten percent of the producers we know will be able to see the value of this approach, and welcome the editor in as a creative partner with valid ideas and a fresh point of view that will only add to the show's audience appeal.  (The guy who just bought the Avid is certain the real percentage is zero.  He has to think that way.  He's still got over a megabuck tied up in Edit A.)   

We know our clients.  It'll work for some of them....

This method is much closer to the most often-encountered Hollywood model of film editing.  (When Hollywood is being sane, businesslike, and efficient.)    Television, and it's methods, grew from the 1950's live, real-time, on-the-air-right-now model, so TV never had time to become thoughtful and even leisurely about how it does things.  Even the term "On-Line" means, literally, on the coax--outbound, live,  to the transmitter;  to the ether,  and spilling out into living rooms everywhere.

These days,  most of us work much more like documentary filmmakers, and much less like live broadcast news people.  So the emphasis on raw editing speed is inappropriate much of the time.

What do you think?

Bill Barrett
StudioOne@eci.com