Biography

While attending Dalton High School in New York City, Derek was drawn to a filmmaking course. There he was introduced to the Maysles brothers' work, who had filmed the Beatles' first US visit and were able to show rushes from "Yellow Submarine". He was hooked.

Years later, he received a grant from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, enabling him to study at the Institute of New Cinema Artists, headed by the Actor/Director Ossie Davis. Upon graduating, he became Manager of the Live Injection Point (LIP), working with the artist Willoughby Sharp.

Soon after came a position with Nick Charney's pioneering Videofashion, publisher of the first magazine distributed on videocassette. It was then that he began to focus on editing.

Derek was also invited to teach at Jon Alperts' Downtown Community Television Center, conducting Sony Porta-Pak editing courses for underprivileged youth in lower Manhattan. Simultaneously, he became Night Manager at Devlin Productions. There he was first exposed to CMX computerized tape to tape linear editing.

Later, at National Video Center, he began to Off-Line Edit, which was then a new creative concept in videotape post-production workflow. From there, Derek was hired at NBC-TV, working on Nightly News and the Today Show. This was the start of his continuing work in broadcast television news.

While working in Europe and England, Derek was asked to return to the US to work on "A Current Affair". That success led to work on other US magazine shows and the international experience has since expanded to editing and teaching worldwide.

After years of teaching and editing, Derek was asked by CMX to work in development and support of a "computerized, random access, non-linear" editing system, using the fastest technology then available, video discs. This work resulted in the CMX-6000, used on many feature films and TV series. Co-writing the User Manual for the 6000 evolved into being Contributing Editor of "Nonlinear: A Field Guide to Digital Film and Video Editing", which was both a historical recounting of non-linear editing and an easy-to-understand definition of it's underlying principles.

Derek became convinced that hard drives were a better solution for editing than video discs and made his first Avid edit in late 1989. Soon after, he became an instructor and provided technical support for that company.

He was soon appointed Director of Educational Services at the popular Santa Monica facility, Montana Edit. He also edited for PBS's Nova before catching the wave of Reality TV - editing the inaugural series in Bravo's franchise "Real Housewives of Orange County", which branded that network. Later he was honored with an Emmy- nomination for the Bunim-Murray produced series "Starting Over". Opportunity then led to work on Terrence Malick's Oscar nominated feature film "The Thin Red Line".

Moving to Toronto, he edited several feature-length documentaries and broadcast series while also producing seminars and events for the local nonfiction post-production community.

Derek remains available for post-production and as an instructor worldwide.
- IMDb mini biography by: Derek McCants