You are about to buy the wrong thing first
Before we edited anything, we told him what not to buy yet.
The situation
June 2025. Mike Riddle, Executive Chef in his own words, with more than twenty years in high end kitchens, was launching a YouTube channel and looking for an editor for his first video. In his own words: "I'm self-funding this, so while I don't have a huge budget yet, I do have a clear vision."
He could already shoot at 8K on his phone, but the rest of his kit had not caught up: no artificial lighting yet, audio gear that was not there yet either. A long list of ideas, and a finite amount of money. He had booked one edit. The normal shape of that job is: take the files, cut them, deliver. Equipment is not the editor's business.
The decision
On 27 June 2025, after he had booked a single edit and before anything larger, we sent a document that was no part of what he had paid for. It reads less like an edit note than a shopping list with things crossed off.
Wait on this one. "Postpone shooting at night until you invest in artificial light sources." Night shoots were in the plan; we asked him to leave them there until the lighting existed.
Get more out of what you already own. "Since you're shooting in higher than 4K, we can always crop in without losing much quality." That held because he was shooting at 8K against a much smaller delivery frame, which is an enormous crop budget; on softer or lower-resolution footage the same move would cost sharpness, so it is the source resolution doing the work rather than a rule that always applies. No purchase required: the gap between what he shot and what he delivered is a second angle he had already paid for.
Where the second camera goes, when he gets there. One on him, one on the cutting board, planned in advance so the purchase, whenever it came, had a job waiting for it. Then frame rate, exposure, folder structure.
Learn your own kit. "Consider watching beginner-level tutorials on YT about your equipment." Capability, not dependency.
And when sound needed more than advice. Later rounds of advisory pointed him towards a microphone, live fire cooking is loud, outdoors and unforgiving on audio, and he bought one.
Why
Founders with a great many ideas tend to run all of them at partial effort, and the interest they get from people close to them keeps the feeling of progress alive while nothing compounds. Equipment decisions eat exactly the capacity that problem needs. Which microphone, which light, which drive: none of it is a chef's expertise, and all of it takes up room.
A day does not have twenty four usable hours in it. Subtract sleep, physical work and a life, and what is left for thinking is three or four. An hour returned there is a quarter to a third more of the only resource that decides what the channel becomes. That is the hour we were buying back.
Beyond the first edit
The same advisory relationship carried into that summer's Artlist $100K Fund competition application, and into a teaser and the Reels cut from the same footage, the kind of expanding scope that tends to follow when the small first thing is handled well. The competition's outcome is not on our record.
What he said afterwards
From his public review, five stars, posted late 2025:
Notes on capture, taste, and storytelling genuinely shape the creative process.
Mike Riddle's brand is now OWN THE FIRE; at the time of this work it was NY BBQ Guys.
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