Video editing
Also known as: post-production, editing
The whole process of turning recorded footage into a finished piece: selecting, ordering, trimming, grading and finishing it.
Updated
What it means
Editing is four jobs that get called one. Choosing what to use, deciding what order it goes in, trimming each piece, and finishing with colour and sound, usually in that order, and skipping one always shows.
The first job dominates for action footage. Hours of material and a few usable minutes makes Clip selection the step that decides everything downstream of it in the process.
The craft is subtraction. A finished edit is defined by what it leaves out, and every other operation is in service of that one idea rather than of adding anything to the material.
How it works in practice
Structure before detail is the rule that saves time. Getting the order right in a Rough cut before touching colour means the grade is done once rather than three times over on three structures.
Tools matter less than people expect. The same decisions exist in iMovie and in a professional application, and only the mechanical speed differs between one and the other.
Finishing is a short phase. Colour, sound, titles and export take a fraction of the time that selection and ordering do, however much attention they get online. The hours are all spent earlier.
What to watch out for
Volume is what defeats most people. Hours of footage rather than any missing skill is why cards stay unedited, and nothing about the craft addresses that. The problem is arithmetic.
Perfecting the wrong layer is the common waste. A careful grade on a sequence with the wrong structure produces a well-finished edit nobody watches twice. Order is the layer underneath all of it.
The feedback loop is slow. An edit takes an evening and the lesson arrives days later, which is why the Editing skill barrier is as much about repetition as it is about technique.
How RawClip handles it
The selection and ordering steps are what get automated, which is where most of the hours and most of the difficulty sit. Finishing in a manual editor afterwards remains perfectly possible and is usually a short job once the structure is right.