Watching an hour so you can find any second of it

The afternoon that decides the week

The instinct on day one is to start cutting. Resist it for one session. Watch everything, once, at normal speed, marking as you go. On a project with an hour of material this takes an afternoon, and it is the afternoon that turns a five-day edit into a two-day one.

The reason is not diligence. It is that an edit is a search problem. Every decision you make in the timeline is really the question what should be here instead? — and you cannot answer it about material you cannot recall. Editors who skip the watch spend their week scrubbing, and scrubbing is both slow and unreliable, because a shot's value is usually in something you cannot see at 8× speed.

Markers, and a code you will still understand later

Every editor supports markers on clips and on the timeline, with a colour and a note. Resolve is M to place, M again immediately to open the note field. Kdenlive, Shotcut and Premiere are all similar.

Agree a colour code with yourself and write it in your project notes. One that works:

• Green — a take you will definitely use.
• Blue — a usable alternative.
• Yellow — something said that matters to structure, even if this take is bad.
• Red — a problem: clipped audio, a focus miss, a wrong fact, a face that has not consented.
• Purple — b-roll worth remembering, with a one-word subject.

The note matters more than the colour. best answer re cost is findable. good is not.

Subclips and selects timelines

Two mechanisms turn markers into something you can edit from.

A subclip is a named fragment of a longer clip that behaves like its own clip in the bin. Mark in and out, make a subclip, name it for its content. An hour-long interview becomes twenty subclips with names like origin story, the mistake, what she would tell a beginner.

A selects timeline — also called a string-out — is a timeline containing only the good bits, in the order they were shot, with nothing removed but the dross. You build it once and then edit from it rather than from the bins. In practice this is how most documentary and interview work is actually done: the first cut is a re-ordering of the selects.

Keywords and smart bins

Where markers describe moments, keywords describe clips. Resolve's Metadata panel has a Keywords field; anything you type there is searchable, and a Smart Bin is a saved search that stays current.

A smart bin for Keyword contains interview AND Flag is green gathers every good interview clip automatically, including the ones you keyword tomorrow. On a project of 300 clips this is the difference between a bin structure that helps and one that is another thing to maintain.

The minimum useful metadata on a documentary-style project: scene or subject, person, location, and a good/alt/no flag. Four fields, typed as you watch.

The transcript is metadata too

For anything with speech, generate a transcript during the watch and keep it open beside the timeline. It makes the material text-searchable, which is a different and much faster kind of finding than scrubbing. The next lesson but one builds a whole editing method on this; for now it is enough that Ctrl+F on a transcript beats twenty minutes of scrubbing.

What to write down that is not in the footage

During the watch, keep a second document — a plain text file — and note:

• Every factual claim that will need checking.
• Every name and its spelling, for the supers later.
• Every place where two takes contradict each other.
• Every moment you had an emotional reaction, with its timecode. These are the moments that end up in the cut, and you will not remember them tomorrow.
• Every shot that is missing. This is the list that gets you a pickup shoot while the location is still available.

Where this is too much

A thirty-second vertical video from a single take does not need a selects timeline. The threshold is roughly: more material than you can hold in your head, which for most people is about fifteen minutes of footage or about eight clips. Below that, cut. Above it, log first.

The honest limitation of logging is that it front-loads the boredom. There is no way to make watching an hour of mediocre footage interesting, and plenty of editors skip it and get away with it on short projects. On anything longer than five minutes of output, they do not.

Today

Take the longest set of footage you have, watch fifteen minutes of it at normal speed, and place a marker with a written note at every moment you reacted. Count them. That number is roughly how many usable beats you have per fifteen minutes, and it is the number that tells you whether you have enough material.