Outsourcing editing
Also known as: hiring an editor, contract editing
Handing a card of footage to somebody else to cut, which replaces the editing work with the work of briefing and reviewing.
Updated
What it means
Outsourcing moves the labour and keeps the judgement. Somebody else assembles the sequence, and the person who was there still has to say what it should be. Taste is not transferable.
The handover is the hard part. An editor who was not at the session cannot know which attempt was the good one, so an Edit brief does the work a memory would.
It solves Editing time rather than the skill question. The hours come back; the decisions about what matters do not go away. Somebody still has to want something specific.
How it works in practice
Transferring the footage is the first obstacle. Hours of 4K over a connection is slow, so proxies, a posted drive or a Resumable upload are all normal answers, and none of them is quick.
A short brief beats a long one. Purpose, length, music direction and the clips that must appear give an editor enough, and anything more becomes a shot list they follow blindly instead of a brief they work from.
One round of notes should be planned for. Timestamped comments on a first version are specific and fast, where a general reaction produces a second version with the same problems in different places.
What to watch out for
Volume makes it awkward. Sending six hours of material means somebody else spends the hours reviewing as well as cutting, and the reviewing is the larger half. Filming less changes this more than anything.
Style mismatch surfaces late. An editor whose default is a fast Supercut will deliver one, and discovering that on the first version is normal rather than a failure.
Ownership and music need settling in advance. Who holds the project file, and whether the Music license belongs to the editor or the rider, are awkward questions afterwards.
How RawClip handles it
An automated edit occupies the same position as an outsourced one, with the brief doing the same job and the result arriving the same way. What changes is that the reviewing happens without a person, so the amount of footage stops being the deciding factor.