Editing Help: What Bots Can and Can't Do

Where editing time actually goes

Before handing anything over, it helps to know where the hours go. For most creators, editing breaks into a few stages:

• Logging: going through the raw footage to find what's usable.
• The rough cut: putting the good parts in order and cutting the rest.
• The fine cut: tightening timing, fixing jump cuts, adding b-roll.
• Sound and color: making it sound and look right.

Logging from a transcript

Here's the idea. You record your raw footage.

Rough-cut notes

The next step up is a rough-cut plan. You ask the bot to suggest an order for the video based on the log.

Captions

Captions are where a bot can save a lot of fiddly work.

Keeping your files in order

This one's not glamorous, but ask anyone with a few hundred videos. Files get messy fast.

Music and sound effects

A bot can help you search for music and sound effects that fit a mood, and keep a list of what you've used and where it came from. That list is useful if a copyright claim ever comes up.

What stays with you

This is what a bot doesn't do well in editing, at least in the way I'm describing it.

A realistic picture of the gain

So what does this add up to? For a talk-heavy video, a bot working with the transcript can take a lot of the logging off your plate and give you a head start on the structure and captions.

Walkthrough: logging four hours of footage

Here's how Patch and Mend logs a long shoot.

What went wrong: the deleted "duplicates"

Early on, the owner asked a bot to "tidy up the footage folder". It found files with similar names and suggested deleting the older versions.