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Click to EnlargeEditing: Polished Work
Your goal with your rough cut is to lay down your shots in the order in which you wish to tell your story. Chances are, if you're producing a narrative, you decided the order of your scenes in pre-production, and you now just need to follow your storyboard as if it were a recipe and assemble the clips accordingly, picking the "best" take for each scene. Many documentaries "write themselves," as the characters describe the subject matter. Either way, in the rough cut, you lay down the shot video and associated audio in the order you wish to tell the story, cutting out everything that does not move the story forward.
Now it's time to polish the rough cut into a smooth, shiny finished product. Unlike the rough cut, where you were lumping together footage to see how the juxtaposition and timing of clips worked together, the polishing requires that you take out your "digital magnifying glass" and work on more of a frame-by-frame level of adjustment.
Let's look at seven aspects of the final edit that we'll call the Polish…
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