Video Editing Professional

What you'll do

AI agents are starting to be pointed at real editing software, and someone has to write the exams. Each task you build is what you would hand a junior editor on their first week: footage, a brief and a delivery spec. The difference is that you also produce the correct answer, a reference edit, plus a hidden rubric so the agent's finished video can be scored on the output itself rather than on a written explanation.

The work has four parts:

• Footage and briefs: supply original footage you shot and fully own, or openly licensed material, and write realistic briefs around it
• Task building: make the task end to end in your own NLE, including planting defects or distractors where the task calls for them, and cut the reference edit
• Grading criteria: concrete, checkable standards, each with the editorial reasoning behind it
• Blind solving: take tasks other editors built, solve them cold and write up your steps

The blind-solve half is a useful check on your own work: if a task you built cannot be solved by a peer from the brief alone, it will not be fair to a model either.

Who fits

• 5+ years editing professionally in film and TV, commercials, broadcast news, or creator and social production, owning deliverables from start to finish
• Fluency in at least one of Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer, including basic colour and audio cleanup
• Comfort with delivery specs: resolution, frame rate, codecs, audio channel layouts and frame-accurate cuts

The strongest plus is a library of unpublished footage you shot yourself and fully own, ideally with people on camera who will sign appearance releases. The ad says plainly that more is better. Stock-heavy editors can still apply via openly licensed sources, but owners of raw footage are clearly first in line.

The application

A resume and a reel or portfolio link, a short AI interview about your editing background, and a questionnaire about your footage: what you have, whether you own it outright, and whether the people in it consent to its use. Have those answers ready before you start; the ownership question is the one that sorts applicants.

What it pays and the commitment

$50 per hour, Mercor's published figure, for about 12 hours a week. Payment is weekly via Stripe or Wise. H-1B and STEM OPT candidates cannot be supported.

Worth knowing

Good:

• Paid to do actual editing in your own software, not to rate clips in a browser
• Pays well above Mercor's application-user listings for Premiere and Resolve, which sit at $30–40/hour for generalists
• Light weekly load that fits around client work
• Payment terms published on the listing

Less good:

• California residents are excluded
• Footage rights matter: anything you contribute must be yours outright, and people on camera need to consent, so client footage is off the table
• $50 flat for a 5-year bar is modest next to professional editing day rates
• Independent contractor; projects can be extended, shortened or ended early, and no duration is given

About this listing

Posted by Mercor as a remote hourly contract and read from the live listing on 12 October 2026, marked as a new opportunity. Pay, hours, the California exclusion and the footage requirements are the ad's own. See Mercor.