Editing time
Also known as: post-production time, edit hours
The hours between a full memory card and a finished edit, dominated by reviewing footage rather than by the cutting itself.
Updated
What it means
The work splits unevenly. Reviewing and choosing takes most of it, assembling takes some, and grading and sound take the rest, which is the opposite of how beginners estimate it. Nobody plans for the watching.
Ratios are brutal for action footage. An hour of mixed material commonly takes several hours to get through properly, because every clip has to be watched before it can be rejected, and rejecting is most of the outcome.
Volume is what drives the figure. Three cameras on one session triple the reviewing without tripling the usable moments, so Multicam editing is demanding in exactly this way.
How it works in practice
Reducing the input is the only real lever. Deleting failures on the card, filming less and marking candidates with a HiLight tag all attack the reviewing rather than the cutting. That is where the hours actually are.
Proxies remove the mechanical friction. Proxy editing turns a sluggish timeline into a responsive one, which does not shorten the decisions but stops them being interrupted. Thinking and waiting do not mix well.
A fixed stopping point helps. Deciding in advance that a session gets two hours produces a finished edit, where an open-ended session produces a Footage backlog.
What to watch out for
Faster hardware is the usual misdiagnosis. A quicker export changes minutes, the reviewing is unchanged, and a Rendering and export improvement is the smallest part of the total. The timeline is not the bottleneck.
Perfecting the grade late is another. Hours spent on colour after the structure is wrong produce a well-graded edit that still does not work. Structure first is not a style preference.
Underestimating it has a knock-on effect. A session that took longer than expected makes the next one less likely to be edited, which is the mechanism behind Editing burnout.
How RawClip handles it
The reviewing step is what gets removed: footage is analysed and scored without a person watching it, and what arrives is a short sequence instead of a long card. The hours left over are the ones about judgement, which are the ones worth spending.