Review a rough cut

What this is about

A first assembly arrives without grading, without a mix, usually with temp music and placeholder titles. Everything about it invites the wrong notes, because unfinished surfaces are easy to see and safe to comment on. Yet the only question this cut can answer is structural: does the film work in this order, at this length, with the material that exists. Getting that answer wrong costs a re-edit later. Spending the round on polish costs nothing today and everything in three weeks, when the structure finally gets questioned and the finished-looking version has to be dismantled.

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

Where this differs from the general case:

• Watch the whole thing once without stopping — that first uninterrupted pass is the only time you will ever see it like an audience
• Note the minute where your attention leaves, not the reason; the cause usually sits somewhere earlier
• Temp music, missing graphics and unmixed sound are the state of the round, not findings
• If a scene works without polish, polish makes it better; if it does not work, polish will not rescue it

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Agree what this cut is meant to prove before you watch it: structure only, structure plus pacing, or near-final. A round without a stated question collects notes nobody can act on.
2. Watch it straight through once, no pausing, no notepad. Your job in that pass is to feel where the film loses you, not to catalogue every imperfection you can name.
3. Write your first impression in three sentences immediately: what the film says, who it is for, where it sagged. That paragraph is worth more than forty timecoded remarks.
4. Watch a second time with timecodes and sort as you go: structural notes in one list, cosmetic ones in another. Only the structural list belongs in this round.
5. Check the opening thirty seconds and the closing fifteen on their own. Viewers leave at the front and remember the back, and both usually need work the middle does not.
6. Run the cut muted, then listen to it with the picture hidden. Muted shows whether the images carry meaning; audio-only shows whether the argument survives without them.
7. Measure the cut against the written brief rather than the film in your head. Name the stated goal, say whether it is reached, and say what you would drop to reach it sooner.
8. Return a ranked list: blocks approval, would improve, noticed but ignore. An editor who knows the ranking fixes the film; one who gets a flat list fixes the cheapest items first.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Giving grading, sound and graphics notes on a cut that was never meant to have any
• Treating a missing scene as an editing problem and asking the timeline to fix the script
• Typing notes live while watching, so the two decisive ones sit buried between forty trivia

With TillyGen

Because the brief, the shot list and the schedule that produced this footage all live in TillyGen, a rough-cut note like 'the process scene is missing' can be traced in a minute: never shot, cut for time, or simply not found in the assembly.

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.