Scene
Also known as: location block, section
A block of action that holds together in one place and one stretch of time, which is the unit an edit is organised in before individual clips.
Updated
What it means
A scene is defined by continuity of place and time. Everything that happened at that beach, on that run or in that car park is one scene, however many clips and however many cameras recorded it.
It is the layer between a session and a clip. A day contains several scenes, each scene contains many clips, and most editing decisions are made at the scene level before anything is trimmed.
Software looks for the same boundaries. Scene detection finds where one block ends and the next begins, which is what turns a long recording into something with structure in it.
How it works in practice
Grouping by scene is the first sort of any card. Clips from one location belong together, and the comparison that matters, which attempt was best, only makes sense inside a scene.
A sequence normally moves scene by scene. Sequence order arranges the blocks and then arranges the clips inside each one, which is a far smaller set of decisions than ordering every clip at once.
One establishing shot per scene is the usual ration. A viewer needs to know where this is once, and repeating that information at every cut slows the whole section down for no reason.
What to watch out for
Mixing scenes inside a section confuses a viewer. Cutting between two locations and back implies a relationship that does not exist, unless a Cross cut is being used deliberately.
Light changes within what feels like one scene. An afternoon at one spot is two scenes as far as colour is concerned, and Color matching has to treat them as separate.
Detection splits on the wrong thing. A camera moving from shade into sun reads as a new scene to software, so boundaries found automatically need a glance before anybody trusts them.
How RawClip handles it
Footage is grouped by scene before anything is ordered, so moments from one location stay together instead of being interleaved with another. That grouping is also what keeps the colour work consistent, since everything inside one scene shares the same light.