The generator makes footage; the editor makes the video

Nobody ships a raw generation

What separates work that looks made from work that looks generated is almost entirely the edit: pace, cut points, sound, colour continuity, and a ruthless discard rate.

Expect shooting ratios. A documentary crew shoots thirty minutes for one that airs. You will generate somewhere between four and ten clips for every one that ships. That is not failure, it is the normal shape of the job, and the sooner you budget for it the sooner you stop taking each bad generation personally.

Conform the frame rate before you import anything

Models output at different frame rates — commonly 24, 25 or 30 — often at 720p or 1080p, and sometimes at odd durations like 5.1 seconds. Drop mixed rates onto one timeline and the mismatched clips judder, because frames are being duplicated or dropped to fit.

Pick the project frame rate first: 24 for a film feel, 30 for social platforms. Set it before importing. In DaVinci Resolve, changing the project frame rate once media is on the timeline is awkward or blocked depending on version, and re-conforming later is a genuine nuisance.

Upscale at the end, once, on the finished cut — not per clip. Upscaling a 720p generation to 4K adds no information. It adds a sharpening signature, and doing it thirty times gives you thirty slightly different signatures.

The three moves that make generated clips read as footage

1. 1Trim the head and the tail by default. Drop roughly the first quarter-second and the last second of every clip. You are cutting off the settle and the drift, which is where a clip announces itself.
2. 2Unify colour and texture. Different generations drift warm or cool independently. One shot-match pass, then a single grade on an adjustment layer across the whole timeline, pulls everything into one world. Then put a light film grain over the entire sequence. Grain is astonishingly effective here, because it gives every clip the same surface texture and it hides the smooth, plastic, denoised quality that reads as synthetic more than any other single property.
3. 3Sound carries the picture. Real room tone, real footsteps, real traffic under a generated street and the brain accepts what it is seeing. Free sources: Freesound, the BBC sound effects archive under its own terms, and your own phone held out of a window. Clean it in Audacity. This is the cheapest quality upgrade in the entire pipeline and it is the one most people skip.

Cut on motion, and cut before the failure

A cut placed during movement is far less visible than a cut on a static frame — the eye is already tracking change. And you decide where the failure lands. If the hand goes wrong at six seconds, the shot is five seconds long and nobody will ever know there was a sixth.

The free toolchain, end to end

• DaVinci Resolve, free tier: a professional editor, colourist and audio suite in one application, free permanently, no watermark on output. Honest limits — the free version withholds some effects and noise reduction, has restrictions around certain high-resolution and codec outputs, and it is heavy software that wants a reasonable GPU and 16GB of RAM.
• Kdenlive and Shotcut: open source, much lighter, and they run happily on older Windows and Linux machines that Resolve will refuse. For cuts, titles and audio they are not worse. For colour work they are clearly behind.
• CapCut on a phone: the whole assembly is genuinely achievable on a phone, and for vertical short-form it is often faster than a desktop. Its free tier and watermarking on certain templates have moved around over time, so check before you deliver something commercial.
• Audacity for audio cleanup on any machine at all.

More depth on all of this in video-editing, and on sound design and motion graphics in motion-and-audio.

Keep four things per shot

For every clip that ships, save the prompt, the seed, the first frame and the model name in a plain text file next to the project. Six weeks later a client will ask for one small change to shot nine, and without those four things you are not editing, you are starting over.

Today: take three clips you already generated. Trim the head and tail off each, put a single grade and a light grain across all three, and lay any real ambient sound underneath. Compare that against the raw exports.