The stages, and how long each really takes

Why the stages exist

The first lesson of this course named them: assembly, rough cut, fine cut, picture lock, then finishing. They are not bureaucracy. Each one exists because the work done in it becomes worthless if the stage before it is not finished.

• Grade a shot before picture lock, and you re-grade it when the shot gets shorter.
• Mix before picture lock, and every trim moves the mix.
• Add titles before structure is settled, and you re-time every one.
• Cut music in during the assembly, and you start protecting the music.

The cost of getting this wrong is not a mistake you can see. It is doing work twice.

Assembly

Everything usable, in order, roughly. Long and ugly. No transitions, no music, no titles, no colour.

The target: everything that might be in the film is in the timeline. If a shot is not here, you will forget it exists.

Expect the assembly to be two to four times your target length. A twelve-minute film assembles at thirty to forty minutes. If your assembly is already close to target length, you have been cutting rather than assembling, and you have made choices without seeing the alternatives.

Time: roughly a day per ten minutes of assembly, from logged material. Much less if you built a selects timeline.

Rough cut

Structure fixed, length roughly right, joins still messy.

This is where the film is made and it is the stage people rush. The work is: remove whole sections, reorder, decide what the piece is. You are making decisions at the paragraph level, not the frame level.

The temptation is to polish a sequence you like. Do not. It will probably be cut, and if it is not, it will be trimmed anyway.

Expect two or three rough cuts. The first is too long, the second has the right structure and is still too long, the third is close.

Time: as long as the assembly again, at least.

Fine cut

Every join trimmed to the frame. J and L cuts built. Pace worked through. The six-frame pass.

Now you are at the frame level, and now the trimming lessons pay for themselves.

Time: about half the rough cut, and it goes fast if the rough cut was honest.

Picture lock

A declaration: no more picture changes. Everybody who needs to sign off has signed off.

It is a real threshold, not a formality, because everything after it is expensive to redo. In a team, lock is announced and the timeline is duplicated and named _LOCKED.

If a picture change is genuinely required after lock — and it sometimes is — the honest handling is to make the change without altering the duration, so the mix and the titles still line up. Replace a shot, do not shorten one.

Finishing

Sound design, mix, colour, titles, captions, graphics, export. In that order, roughly, though sound and colour can run in parallel because they touch nothing in common.

Time: for a twelve-minute piece, one to three days depending on how much graphics work there is.

The honest ratios

For planning, on documentary-style material with a single editor:

• Logging: one hour per hour of rushes, roughly.
• Assembly to fine cut: three to five hours of work per finished minute, on unscripted material. A ten-minute film is thirty to fifty hours.
• Finishing: two to four hours per finished minute if there are graphics, less if not.

Scripted or tightly briefed work is much faster — one to two hours per finished minute is realistic. Heavily interview-driven documentary can be far slower; ten hours per finished minute is not unusual on complex material.

These numbers exist so you can quote a job. The commonest cause of an unprofitable edit is a quote based on how long it takes to cut a good sequence, multiplied by the number of sequences, with no allowance for the three rough cuts.

Working with someone else's schedule

A client wants to see something early. Show them the rough cut, not the assembly — an assembly makes a piece look bad in ways that have nothing to do with how it will turn out, and you will spend the review explaining that.

And tell them what stage they are looking at. "This is a rough cut: structure is what I need your view on, the colour and sound are not done and the titles are placeholders." Without that sentence you will get notes about the font.

Today

Estimate the hours in the last piece you edited, divide by its finished minutes, and write down the number. That is your own ratio, and it is the one to quote from.