Post-Production : 6 Tips To Know Before Editing Your First Feature by Maurice Vaughan

Thank you for sharing, Maurice Vaughan! You just beat me to it. I appreciate you!

Great share!

:) You're welcome, Ashley Renee Smith.

Thank you for sharing!

You're welcome, Benjamin Elliott. Hope the blog's helpful.

This is a great post, touching on many of the things I learned editing features as well. I just wish I had the luxury of editing while the feature was shooting! I’m usually doing art dept, or sound, or AD so I don’t get to look at the footage thoroughly till we’re done.

Does that happen sometimes, Mike Boas? Editing while the movie is being filmed? I thought all movies were edited after filming was done.

If you read the blog post, Boyer talks about reviewing footage and doing rough edits of each day's footage as soon as possible. He's putting in long days and trying to keep up. The advantage there is to catch problems or areas where connecting material is needed. Even before digital, editors on big productions would be brought on during shooting for the same reason. I read Paul Hirsch's book last year, and he talks about editing The Empire Strikes Back that way. (On Star Wars, he came in much later, but there were other editors doing rough cutting during shooting.)

On the narrative features I've edited, I've barely had time to look at footage until we're done. But if you can have an editor act as DIT person, that's a huge advantage. On one feature with a DIT, we found that some footage got wiped by mistake, but we found out that same day so we had the option to reshoot. On another, there was no DIT person, and we found out much later that a significant amount of audio was recorded too loud. If we found out sooner, the sound recordist could have been told to adjust in future scenes.

Thanks for the answer, Mike Boas. I read the blog, but it's been a week and I've read so many other things since then. It must've slipped my mind. I think it's smart to edit as you go because of what you said ("The advantage there is to catch problems or areas where connecting material is needed"). Same thing with scripts. I edit as I go. I think if I waited until the end to edit, it'd be harder. It's kinda like tackling a problem in smaller parts (edit as I go) instead of dealing with the problem all at once (when the script is done).