Choosing takes before you start cutting

Four passes, in order

Editors work in passes because each one asks a different question and mixing them produces paralysis.

1. Selects. For each shot, which take? Judge the take alone.
2. Assembly. Put the chosen takes in order, full length, no trimming. Does the sequence work?
3. Rough cut. Trim to length. Find the cut points.
4. Fine cut. Frame-level adjustment, then colour, then sound, then titles.

Beginners try to do all four at once and get stuck on shot three for an hour. The passes exist because each one’s decisions are only makeable once the previous one is settled.

The selects pass

You generated four takes of shot nine. Watch all four, in full, before choosing.

What you are judging, in this order:

• Did it do the thing the shot is for? Not whether it is pretty. If shot nine exists to show her noticing the door, the take where she notices the door wins even if another is prettier.
• Where does it break, and when? Note the timecode. A take that fails at six seconds is fine if the shot is four seconds long.
• Does it match its neighbours? Light direction, wardrobe, screen direction.
• Then aesthetics.

Mark the chosen take and keep the rejects. A reject often becomes a cutaway, an insert, or a source for a repaired frame later.

Write the choice down next to the shot on your list. Do not rely on file names alone; s09_take4 does not tell you why.

The stringout

Put every selected take end to end, untrimmed, in script order. This is a stringout and it is the most useful ugly thing in editing.

It will be far too long and it will feel wrong. That is correct. What it tells you, which nothing else does:

• Whether the sequence makes sense at all.
• Which shots are missing. You will find two or three, every time, and finding them now costs a generation rather than a re-edit.
• Which shots are unnecessary. You will find more of these than missing ones.
• Where the piece sags.

Watch it once, all the way through, without stopping to fix anything. Take notes on paper. Stopping to fix is the beginning of the hour on shot three.

Cutting the length down

From stringout to rough cut, the operations are almost all subtraction:

• Trim the head and tail of every clip. Roughly a quarter-second off the front for the settle, and a second off the back for the drift. This is not a stylistic choice; it is removing the parts where the generation announces itself.
• Cut the shots that were doing nothing. If removing a shot does not hurt, it was not working.
• Shorten everything. Almost every rough cut is improved by being ten per cent shorter. Commercial editing runs two to four seconds a shot; your instinct for shot length is probably long.

Pace is a pattern, not a speed

A sequence of shots all the same length reads as mechanical. Vary them: a long establishing shot, three short ones, a longer one to let something land.

The simplest useful pattern is to let the shot after a fast run breathe. Three quick cuts then a held shot gives the audience somewhere to arrive, and it is the difference between energy and noise.

In generative work this pattern has a practical bonus: short shots hide drift, and the one long shot can be the one you generated most carefully.

Keeping the decision record

At the end of the assembly, your shot list should carry, per shot: the chosen take, the reason, and the intended length. That document is what lets you answer a client’s note about shot nine three weeks later without rewatching everything.

It is also what tells you, honestly, how many generations the project actually took: the number your next quote depends on.

Today: build a stringout of everything you have generated for one project and watch it once, straight through, taking notes on paper without touching the timeline.