Re: Edit Times

There is no one size fits all rule for this question, so much of it depends on how much effort you want to put into the project, how much you have to work with, the particular features and problems in your footage, how much you want to experiment with alternative cuts, enhancements, etc.

The cynical answer is perhaps that it takes exactly as much time as you have before the deadline. I.E. a lot of folks just keep working at it until they run out of time, the saying goes: "a project is never truly finished, merely abandoned at some point". In news cutting, you definitely have a short deadline most times, and you just throw things together as best you can in the time alloted and that's all you can do.

The fastest I have ever cut on a linear system was exactly 2 times real time, that is, it took 2 hours to edit one hour, but that was extremely simplistic A/B cuts-only editing that was only shortening something that was already shot in story order and just needed the excess heads and tails cut off each shot. I have occasionally cut something faster than realtime on my old Discreet Edit* by scrubbing thru the timeline at faster than normal speed, and very quickly slashing thru some dead spots between stuff I needed. I don't recommend it, but it can be done, if you are pretty familiar with the material as it goes in and you have a good concept of what needs doing ahead of the job.

This would be for example in making instant highlight reels immediately after a live event. I'd be digitizing the footage as it was happening live, then run into the editing room and shorten the thing up right on the timeline with great big straight cuts here and there based on time of day time code and notes I took while live-switching the original feed. If you pace the live shot selections right, you can create a rythm in the shots, so you know for example that every major section of the speech is bracketed by wide shots, like paragraphs in punctuation, so you can scrub thru and mark those in and out in seconds, without even listening to them, just counting the wide cutaways as they fly by in scrub mode.

Many times the editing takes as long as the schedule will permit. Sometimes longer. I think Apaocalypse Now may hold the record for slowest edit; Walter Murch says that on a good day, they made one edit per day. That is, go one at a time thru matching shots for one scene from all the multiple cameras covering that scene, decide on the best performances and best angles, pick a shot, splice it in, review it in the context of what came before and comes after, then approve it, or not, and undo it and try something else. One single cut a day. Oy.

For something that's relatively linear, like a concert performance, I would synch up all the cameras and play it thru in real time, marking in the cuts on the fly as if using a regular switcher. For a one hour show, the synchronization and first quasi-live pass marking the cuts on the beat might take me two hours, plus an hour of digitizing ingest time for each camera used (this figure will be different if you don't use tape). So for three cameras on a one hour shoot, that's five, maybe six hours to the first rough cut, assuming normal breaks for food and etc.

But that's really just a first step. To make the thing better, I would then go back thru the master and play with dropping in extra cut-aways and b-roll, and sliding around some L-cuts as well as playing with dissolves, superimpositions, PIP, and any other special effects. That could take one or two days.

The I would go thru the whole finish cut again just to tweak the audio, and once more to make sure all the colors and picture levels were good.

So roughly 3 days to a week would be a comfortable schedule for doing this, but if you tell me it has to be ready in a day, I'll make it ready in a day. It just won't look the same as it would if I took a week. And if it has to be ready in 4 hours, I can do that, but again, it won't look the same, nor as good.