Clip selection
Also known as: shot selection, culling
Deciding which recorded clips make the edit, the first and most consequential step of turning a card of footage into a sequence.
Updated
What it means
Selection is where an edit is won. Every later decision operates inside the set of clips chosen here, and nothing in grading or pacing rescues a weak one. The ceiling is set before the first cut.
The job has two halves. Finding the moments worth keeping, then discarding everything that duplicates them, and the second half is the one people skip. A card of candidates is not yet a selection.
It is separate from ordering. A chosen clip still has to be placed, which is what a Rough cut is for, and the two decisions interfere with each other constantly. A clip that earns its place alone can lose it in context.
How it works in practice
Two passes beat one. The first marks anything possible without judging it, the second compares the marks against each other, which is faster than deciding clip by clip. Comparison is quick; judgement in isolation is slow.
Criteria are worth naming before starting. Does something happen, is it readable, is the picture usable; a clip failing any of the three goes regardless of how much the rider liked the run.
Markers make the work survivable. Markers or a HiLight tag from the camera turn a card into a shortlist, and hours of approach footage never need to be opened.
What to watch out for
Keeping too much is the universal failure. A selection of eighty clips becomes an edit nobody finishes, and the honest number is usually a fraction of that.
Near-identical takes slip through. Four attempts at one feature read as repetition however good each is, which is what Duplicate shot detection is for and what an attached rider will not do.
Technical faults get forgiven at review and punished on export. A soft or shaking clip that looked acceptable on a laptop is obvious on a television, so Blur detection belongs before taste.
How RawClip handles it
This is the step that is automated: every clip is scored on action, composition and picture quality, duplicates are collapsed, and what survives is ordered into a sequence. Review then happens on a finished edit rather than on a card of raw files.