Roughing It: The Do’s and Don’ts for Editing a Rough Cut

• September 4, 2016

• Film Editing Pro

The famous Greek philosopher Plato observed that the beginning is the most important part of any work. He was talking about educating children, but his point applies to video editing, too.

So how do you get off on the right foot with editing a movie, trailer, or commercial? Simple…by editing a solid rough cut.

In this short tutorial we’ll walk you through:

1. The basics of the rough cutting process

2. How to quickly edit your picture and audio

3. Tips for cleaning up your cut

4. Advice about presenting your cut to a client or director

Let’s begin.

What is a rough cut?

A rough cut is a crude version of what your movie, trailer, or commercial is going to be. It’s created by assembling the best takes in their raw form into a simple timeline.  Often, this is the first time a story, that has previously existed only in the minds of the writer and director, gets to play in the real world.

It’s sort of like building a house. You wouldn’t just start throwing up walls. You’d lay out the individual rooms inside the overall footprint. If you needed to extend the master closet by two feet, you’d see immediately how it impacted the master bedroom. Just like a house, a movie, trailer, or commercial has to live within some overall length parameters.

A rough cut is your first attempt at making everything fit.

Does Length Really Matter?

In a word, yes. Most of the projects you will work on as an editor need to come in at a particular length. It may be a very precise length, such as 30 seconds for a commercial. Or it might be an approximate length, like with a movie.

Check out this chart below, adapted from Slashfilm.com showing the way movie lengths have changed since the 1910s. From the sixties to today, movies have hovered around 127 minutes, give or take. Rarely do films today run much