Editing: Polished Work

Morgan Paar
April 2008

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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 Edit.

We'll start with one of the most difficult of the steps: killing your favorites. This is not technically difficult, but it is psychologically hard. The general rule is that you should cut everything that does not move the story forward. But what about that unplanned shot of the rare ivory-billed woodpecker that flew out of the jungle and landed on the head of the Bengal tiger that walked onto the scene during the magic hour while your camera just happened to be rolling? Cut it! It's difficult to be objective with these edits, especially if you are the one who shot the video. Many times you need to listen to others who tell you that something is not working. It's interesting to watch on DVD the extended director's cuts of major Hollywood films to see scenes cut out of the original theatrical releases. Nine and a half times out of ten, you'll find that it was appropriate to remove those scenes.

Most times, especially for a paid editing job, you will have a TRT or Total Running Time limitation that you must observe. The strictest example of this might be a segment for television. If you make an hour-long show for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), it will be not 60 minutes, but 52 minutes and thirty seconds - not one frame longer or shorter. If you shoot a wedding video or a short video for a film festival, you may have more leeway. Otherwise, you need to know your parameters and keep them in mind as you polish your way to a final cut.

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