An editing workflow that scales

Budget it honestly

If those numbers look high, that is the point. Quote from them, not from optimism.

Ingest, the same way every time

1. 01Copy, never move. Verify the copy before you even think about formatting a card.
2. 02Everything lands in 01-raw, untouched, for the life of the project.
3. 03Second local copy the same day. Offsite within the week.
4. 04Generate proxies or optimised media before you start if the footage is heavy. Ten minutes now saves an afternoon of stuttering playback.

Cull ruthlessly, once

Culling is the highest-leverage hour in the whole process and the one most people do badly, by drifting through footage three times without deciding anything.

1. 01First pass, fast. Yes or no only. Do not zoom in. Do not compare. Trust the gut, move.
2. 02Second pass, on the yeses only. Now compare near-duplicates and keep the best of each.
3. 03Third pass, pick the heroes. The five to ten frames or beats the whole piece will be built around.
4. 04Everything cut goes to the bank, tagged, not deleted. That is next month's content.

“Decide once. Every frame you look at twice is unpaid time.

Build in the same order every time

1. 01Structure first, silent. Lay the story beats with no music, no colour, no titles. If it does not work silent, music will not save it.
2. 02Then sound. Music, levels, and cleaning up dialogue. Sound carries more of the emotional weight than picture does.
3. 03Then colour. Match shots first, then grade the look. An adjustment layer over the whole timeline keeps it consistent and changeable.
4. 04Then titles and graphics. Last, because they are the thing most likely to change.
5. 05Then the cutdowns. Only once the hero is locked, so you are not re-cutting five clips every time a note comes in.

Recut the opening, not the whole thing. About eighty percent of an edit is reusable across platforms. The first three seconds almost never are. Build the hero, then rebuild only the opening beat for each destination. That is the difference between five deliverables and five edits.

Export specs that stop arguments

Deliver like it matters

• A branded gallery or a clean link. Never a fifteen-attachment email.
• Both sizes of everything, in clearly named folders. Do not make them ask.
• A short note saying what is in there and what to do with it.
• The invoice, the same day, if it is not already paid.
• One line telling them when the gallery expires, so it never becomes your problem later.

Version, never overwrite. v1, v2, v3, and keep them all until the job is paid and archived. The client who asks to go back to the second version is not rare, and being able to say yes in ten seconds is worth the drive space.