There’s an old saying that you write a movie three times: once while crafting the script, once while shooting it, and then finally while editing it. So free your mind of any notion that editing is merely a technical process in which clips are arranged in a pre-determined order. Rather, think of editing as a creative process like writing in which you create a story piece by piece.

This is where the challenge arises: Although you may be writing a story, all the “words” have already been created for you. It’s up to you to choose which words you’re going to use and in what order.

Getting Organized#

When the time finally comes to sit down and edit your project, you will likely be excited to do so. Still, even though you are no doubt eager to dive in and start cutting scenes together, the first step is to get organized.

This starts with bringing all of your footage into the software you’re using to edit. Now usually you’ll want to work directly with the native files, but if you shot your film in a high resolution format (like 4K raw), you may consider making proxy files. Proxies are lower resolution versions of your footage which make it easier to move clips around and quickly render them while editing.

Your next step is naming all your video clips, usually mirroring the way that shot was slated. So for example, a clip labeled 3A_1 would be scene 3, set-up A, take 1. With all your footage labeled, you’ll want to sort it into different bins, usually grouping together shots that will be used in the same scene. You’ll also want to have bins ready for other elements you may be bringing into the project such as titles, sound effects, music, still images, etc.

You’ll also want to plan how you’re going to organize your different sequences. While there will be a master timeline where you lay out your whole film together at some point, at the beginning you’ll want to work with smaller, more manageable timelines to edit individual scenes.

Finally, once your footage is linked to the software, labeled, and sorted, and you have your sequences ready to go, there’s only one step left before you start editing...

Reviewing Footage#

Now, if you’re an editor who wasn’t on set, watching all the footage is a task that makes sense, even if it is a bit labor-intensive. But let’s say you’re the director of a small DIY video who was there for every second of filming. Do you really need to watch back all of that footage?

Absolutely.

The fact of the matter is that what felt good on set is not always the same thing that will look good on your computer monitor. Likewise, without distractions, you may notice that there are small moments of brilliance in the take that you thought was unusable. Watch your footage all the way through with a notebook at the ready (if you have notes from set, watch it with those notes) and start to mentally edit the picture before you’ve actually made a single cut.

The Assembly Cut#

The first pass at a movie is called the assembly cut. Try not to get too concerned with things like pacing as all you’re doing in this cut is loosely stringing the footage out to get a sense of the shape of your movie’s structure and see whether you’re missing anything.

Editing Your Coverage in the Assembly Cut#

When editing a scene, a good place to start is to put your favorite take of the master in your timeline. Now, unless you’re planning to play the scene out in one long take, you’ll want to cut around to some of your coverage. While the exact rhythm and shot pattern of your scene can only be known when looking at that specific footage, for the purposes of the assembly cut, you may find that using a basic editing pattern like the one below will prove helpful.

1. Start with an establishing shot if one was filmed.
2. Begin the events of the scene in the wide or master shot.
3. As the characters within the scene start to interact, cut in to your medium shots.
4. As the emotion of the scene grows more intense, move closer and closer towards your subjects. Play the most emotional beat in a close-up.
5. Once the emotional climax of the scene is over, cut back into your medium or wide shots to let some of the tension out.
6. If any inserts were shot for certain actions, drop those in. If only just to see how they “feel” in context.

Now this is just a general rule or starting place. Perhaps you want to play the whole scene in close-ups. Or perhaps you’re more concerned with comedy over getting “close” to the characters, so you elect to stay in wider shots for the entire scene. Whatever your prerogative is, pick a basic structure for your assembly cut and stick with it. You’ll have plenty of time for fine-tuning later.

Other Assembly Advice#

1) One Thing at a Time — It’s easy to get bogged down if you’re trying to craft a great movie during your first pass. With an assembly, it’s best to start at the beginning, get a functional version of the first scene, and then move on to the second. Try not to come back to a scene until you have an assembly of every scene in the film and can lay them all out one after the other.

2) Try Out Different Versions — If you’ve thought of two different ways that a scene could be edited and you’re not sure which is better, assemble a version of each scene. Assembly editing moves much more quickly than fine-tune editing so if you can get a sense for which version of the scene is working better at this early stage, you’ll save a lot of time compared to if you only assembled the first version and then edited the whole picture with a nagging sense that there was a better way to cut that scene.

3) It Will Be Bad — By design, an assembly cut is going to be loose and unfocused, so try not to take it too personally when it’s... well, bad. Not only that, but it is also going to be waaaaaaaay too long. After all, you haven’t fine-tuned the cut yet, nor have you cut out the scenes that aren’t working. An assembly is only meant to give you an overall sense of the movie you’re making. Once that’s done, you can move on to the hard work of making that movie good.

The Rough Cut#

With the assembly cut out of the way, you can start to move towards a version of your project with a little more artistry to it. Below, we’re going to talk through basic editing techniques as well as some strategies to keep in mind while crafting your movie.

Managing Pace#

One of the most important jobs of the editor is managing the pace of a film. If a moment, scene, or sequence is too long or too short, it’s up to you to make the necessary changes.

Often times the thing that drags down a film’s pace is showing the audience something they don’t need to see. The best places to look for this “fat” is often at the heads and tails of scenes, also known as the beginnings and the ends. This is where you tend to see a lot of characters entering and exiting rooms which can usually be cut without confusing the audience. If someone is in a room, we’ll assume that they entered it.

Creating Performance in the Edit#

Along with pace management, the other main job of the editor is to craft the performances of the actors. A great editor can make a mediocre performance seem refined, while a bad editor can ruin a good performance. Here are three things to keep in mind while building an actor’s performance in the edit.

1) Edit all the Performances At Once: When selecting which take of an actor’s performance to use, you want to pick the take which best works in the context of the other performances in that scene. For example, a performance that seemed heartbreakingly beautiful when watched by itself may seem melodramatic and over-the-top if you cut to it right after another actor’s more subdued line reading. It’s all about finding the right balance between your performers so that the scene works as a whole not only as a collection of parts.

2) The Kuleshov Effect: This concept dates all the way back to Russia in the 1910s where a filmmaker named Kuleshov pointed out that an audience will read a performance differently based on what context surrounds it.

In his famous example, he would show a man with a neutral expression looking intently at something, then cut to a bowl of soup, and finally cut back to the man. Audiences tended to think that the man was giving a convincing performance of someone who is hungry.

However if he used the exact same shots of the man, but cut to a coffin rather than to the soup, audiences tended to believe he was giving a subtle performance of grief. Likewise, if the middle shot was a woman posing seductively, they all read his performance as lustful.

It is therefore crucial to remember while editing a performance that the audience will take into account what they just saw before the shot and what they see immediately after the shot. If you keep this in mind, you can elevate a dull performance. If you forget about this, you can accidentally ruin a good performance.

3) Stealing Moments: When searching for the perfect reaction shot of your actor, keep in mind that the audience will never know the context of where you selected a take from. Therefore, it may prove wise to pull a reaction from earlier or later in the scene if it fits your needs in the moment. Other times, you may get even more creative and pull some footage from before the director called action if the actor inadvertently made the perfect face on camera. (If you need a shot of the character listening intently, sometimes the best footage to use will be from when the actor was listening to the director.)

Continuity#

Continuity is the idea that something presented in one shot must be consistent in the next. For example, if she picked up the sword with her right hand in the wide shot, it would break continuity to find the sword in her left hand when we cut to the medium. In an assembly, continuity is often ignored so making sure there are no jarring continuity errors can be a crucial part of refining your cut.

However, please note that while continuity is an important thing, it is not the most important thing. You’ve watched this footage a million times so you’ll be more aware of these little mistakes than a first-time viewer will be. At the end of the day, story, performance, pace, and tone should be more important than simple continuity.

Cutting on Action#

As you refine your edit, finding the perfect cut point to move from one shot to the next will be crucial. While there are many ways to do this, something to consider is cutting on action. In other words, if someone starts to sit down in the wide shot and you cut to them settling into their chair in the medium shot, the cut will flow seamlessly for the audience. It will also give your film a sense of momentum, since the audience can sense the cuts aren’t happening at random. Things are moving forward with a purpose.

L and J Cuts#

Two incredibly important techniques when editing a film are the L-Cut and the J-Cut. In both cases, some of the audio from the neighboring shot will be played over the shot we’re looking at. These types of cuts are particularly useful when editing dialogue scenes as you’ll hear some of Character A’s dialogue while the camera is still on Character B. This creates the sense that the two characters are in the same space together rather than simply cutting to a new distinct space after each one says his or her line.

(Add pictures showing what these cuts look like in Sequence)

In an L cut, the audio from the A clip continues even after we’ve cut to the B Clip. The way the audio clip moves farther to the right than its video counterpart mimics the shape of an L.

In a J cut, the audio from the B clip starts before we’ve cut away from the A Clip. The way the audio clip moves farther to the left than its video counterpart mimics the shape of a J.

Cross Cutting#

While most of the time, you’ll edit a scene from beginning to end, sometimes it might prove necessary to cut back and forth between two or more locations to show scenes that are all occurring simultaneously. This is called cross cutting, and it can be used to create tension (she runs after the villain while he’s in the basement desperately trying to diffuse the bomb) or it can be used to create a sense of mystery (we’ll assume the things we’re cutting between are related... but how?).

While occasionally you may find yourself cross cutting between two scenes that were intended to play out separately, in most cases the intention to cross cut was established during the script stage. However, even if it was written into the script, a lot of the storytelling specifics will be created in the edit. When cross cutting, there are some things to keep in mind:

1. Try not to stay with one scene too long. This ensures the audience won’t forget that you’re cross cutting in the first place.
2. Make sure something new happens every time you cut back somewhere. This “something new” may be a plot development or it may be as simple as the villain’s car is now closer to the hero’s car than it was before. Anything to help us feel like we have forward progression and aren’t repeating ourselves.
3. Cut away at the most exciting point. While this rule doesn’t need to be followed to an absolute T, it can prove very helpful, because it ensures that your audience will always be excited to cut back to somewhere. For example, if you cut away from scene A at an exciting or intriguing point, then cut away from Scene B at a similarly exiting point, the audience won’t be annoyed to be leaving the excitement of B, because they’ll be getting back to their excitement of Scene A. In this way, you can rack up the excitement throughout an entire cross-cut sequence without letting up.

The Final Cut#

Once you’ve honed your assembly into something a little more polished, you’ll have a rough cut. At this point, you aren’t quite ready to share your project with the world, but you’re probably ready to share it with some of your trusted collaborators or friends to get a read on what’s working and what isn’t.

Sharing Cuts for Notes#

When sharing the project for notes, you’ll likely want to export a low quality version of the video to send out. The quality should be good enough to not be distractingly bad, but still compressed enough to ensure that sharing the file is easy. You should also consider exporting with timecode included on the image. This is a running clock that keeps track of hours, minutes, seconds, and frames as the film goes on, and most editing softwares will be able to add it to your cut automatically. This makes it easier for someone giving notes to tell you exactly where the note is relevant without having to scrub through the video to find the time.

Fine Cutting#

Once you’ve gone through your notes and decided which are worth trying and which are worth discarding, you’re going to begin the final passes of your project. Here, you’ll be doing a type of editing called “fine cutting.” This type of editing is no longer about trimming things down by a matter of minutes or seconds, but rather trimming things down by a matter of frames.

While frames are short—each only lasts a 24th of a second—they are still hugely important. On a subconscious level, two frames can be the difference between a character’s retort feeling witty and comical or feeling awkward and stilted. As a general rule, beginner editors tend to leave too many frames at the beginnings and ends of their shots. So rather than trimming the heads and tails of your scene, in fine cutting you’re going to trim the heads and tails of your shots.

Unfortunately, fine cutting isn’t an exact science, so all you can do is trial and error. You want to get your shot to the point where cutting to it a frame earlier would feel premature, but cutting to it a frame later would feel like waiting too long.

Picture Locking#

When you’re satisfied with your final cut, it’s time to “picture lock” your movie. This means you are totally done with video editing. While certain shots in your film might still be temporary to be replaced later (such as titles or VFX shots), picture locking means that you will no longer make any changes that adjust the timing or length of the film. While picture locking may be painful in a “there’s no turning back now” kind of way, it’s absolutely essential to lock that picture because there are a whole host of final concerns that can only be addressed after the film’s timing is locked in place.

More about that here (link to finishing your film to be added)