Organize an edit

What this is about

Every editor knows both kinds of project. In one, media sits in a documented structure, sound is synced, selects are marked and version three means the third version. In the other, four drives hold overlapping folders, the good interview take exists as a memory, and the timeline named final-final-2 is not final. The difference between them is about a half day of setup work — done once, before creative work begins. On corporate timelines with fixed review dates, that half day is the difference between confident delivery and apologetic emails.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• No cutting on unverified media: the completeness check against shoot reports happens before the project file exists
• One project skeleton for every job — footage by day and camera, audio, graphics, music, exports — so any colleague can take over mid-edit
• The selects pass is not optional overhead; it is the edit of the edit, and it halves every later search
• Version names follow one rule and 'final' is banned from filenames — v01, v02 with dates tell the truth mechanically

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Verify before importing: compare delivered media against camera and sound reports, chase gaps immediately, and confirm checksums if the handover included them. Missing clips age badly.
2. Build the standard project skeleton and copy media into it — never cut from a drive whose structure someone else controls. The edit owns its media from this moment.
3. Prepare the material: sync dual-system sound, apply viewing LUTs, group multicam. This dull hour prevents three weeks of tiny frictions.
4. Run a selects pass with markers and keywords: rate interview answers, tag B-roll by topic, flag the magic moments. Cut assembly then starts from curated material, not from the haystack.
5. Define version discipline before the first export: naming scheme, one changelog line per version sent, and archived copies of every version that ever reached a reviewer.
6. Automate project backups to a second location and test that a restore works. Edit projects are small files carrying weeks of decisions — losing one is losing the decisions.
7. Plan the review cadence with the stakeholders now, not after the rough cut: who sees which version, in what tool, with which deadline. The edit calendar is a communication plan.
8. Keep the timeline honest as you go: label temp material loudly, park alternates in a marked section, delete dead ends weekly. A tidy timeline is a tidy argument.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Starting the cut on incomplete media and discovering the gap at picture lock
• Skipping selects to save a day and paying it back triple in searching
• Version names as mood — final, final2, FINAL-new — until nobody knows what the client saw

With TillyGen

The shot list from TillyGen arrives in the edit as structure: exported as CSV, it maps scenes and shots to bins, and the take log written against it tells the editor where the circled material lives before the first search.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.