One Simple Step to INSTANTLY Speed Up Your Documentary Editing

Want to speed up your documentary film editing and also get to know your footage better in one simple step? That’s exactly what this video is all about. Since I started my edits off this way I’ve become a faster documentary editor and at the same been able to see my story more clearly.

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📸 Thumbnail Photo by Ryan Hill

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Intro
1:27 - Why this step is crucial when starting editing
3:15 - Definition of Dailies
5:42 - How to start cutting dailies
13:01 - Audiio, sponsor of today’s video!
15:38 - Why Should you do this

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IG: @lucforsyth (BTS content, but I’m TERRIBLE at DMs - sorry!)

[LucForsyth]

What does your editing process look like? Have any hacks to speed up the job? Let me know!

[jaydelturco]

20+ year editor here, this process is a must. Great video Luc! I like to take it one step further and group like clips together in my dailies and then use a track to drop a text title above those clips and name the title something related to the grouped clips instead of using the marker range. Then when you scroll through the timeline quickly you can see what the group is without needing to hover over a marker and can easily move the title with the clips if needed. I do the same thing for interviews and leave a note in the title that gives me the gist of what they said. It takes a little extra time but makes it so much easier to find what you need when you're weeks or months into a project. Any specific clips that I want to stand out I change the clip color and use the top three clip colors in Resolve (orange, apricot and yellow) as kind of a rating system. Again takes time but when you're dealing with hundreds or maybe thousands of clips, anything that makes it so you can scan through a timeline quickly and find what you need saves 10x more time during the edit.

[petemellows]

I’ve just finished and uploaded an interview I did a couple of weeks back. In the process of editing, I was just beginning to do similar techniques in Resolve.
Because we touched on subjects in and off throughout the interview, I had to piece all of those together in separate bins and timelines.
The best thing I learned, by accident, was that you can select all the timelines and create a new timeline out of those. THEN, editing the original timelines affects the master one. This saved me so much time and stress.
I know this is an older video, but I love how it showed up just as my video went live.

[EwenBell]

The Cut window in Resolve was a huge mystery for me when I first got started with editing. I didn't really understand it's value, and then we started working on some bigger projects and I bought the Speed Editor (as a bundle special with the studio license) and it changed everything. Saved as days and days of work in the long run, and now we have a super slick workflow. We don't touch a project until the Speed Editor has been dragged across the full set of footage, and we have extracted a master file of highlight cuts to begin the real process of editing. Great demo Luc, I hope lots of people are going to head this advice :)

[raksh]

This is funny, but I've gone in the opposite direction. I used to create dailies reels but this became very time consuming. Now I edit interviews first and create a narrative. Then I look through folders of appropriate footage to find supporting visuals. This works because I'm a solo operator and have at least an idea of what has been shot. On rare occasions, I play with the dailies first and create sequences, but the story has to come first. Dropping all footage into a project eventually makes a project file unwieldy for the computer, so selecting which clip you want to include cuts down on project file size.

[mlbreel]

I’ve avoided editing my personal project for several years now. I’ve been filming it for over twenty years now so it’s not just a film but rather my “ life’s work”. So, yes, I have to get past this stasis I’m stuck in or I’ll die with a lot of footage that someone will simply toss as pointless.

[Brian-Hansen]

Thanks Luc! 100% the way to do it. I can confirm that getting your footage out of bins and onto timelines is really the only way to handle a lot of footage.

[spencers-adventures]

Really appreciate the thoughtful, in depth videos. Thanks for sharing, Luc!

[joenicklo]

Hell yes. One thing I want to add is...creating, printing and reviewing your transcripts. It's a bit old school but it's helped me a lot.

[BT.MediaCT]

I cannot express to you how much I love you chill, helpful, straightforward your videos are. This one helped me immensely. I'm struggling less with gear these days, and more eith pre & post production workflow efficiency & organization. This video showed me a lot of was I could have made my current project easier!

[BaoNguyen-ylpn]

This workflow was specific to the needs of the doc style show I worked on but here was my workflow.

- Put ALL B-Roll into one timeline

- Then they are organized / grouped by scene

- As I'm doing this I delete any footage that is 100% clearly unusable but like to keep everything else.

- After all clips are grouped by scene then you order the scenes in chronological order

- The scenes are then color coded. Do this for B-Roll and the interview footage so that if the interview footage is labeled a forest green color, you can go to the b-roll and quickly identify the related footage since it's the same color.

- I never used a bright yellow/gold color for color coding scenes. I assigned that to a keyboard shortcut and used that color label to highlight the best 10/10 individual B-roll clips. These are the best shots that I know I want to use. It's also helpful for social media teaser edits since all the best shots are highlighted.

- There is sometimes overlap between shots that can be used in more than one scene. In that case you can select the clip, color code the video with the primary scene it fits best into, and color code the audio for the other scene it could potentially work in. My show had minimal overlap so I would usually just be able memorize which shots could work in other scenes.

But yeah no idea if anyone will ever even see this comment but it worked really well for me because the show was structured in a way that every scene was another location with it's own interview specific to that location and we never jumped back and forth so it was just one by one. So there was minimal overlap between B-Roll. In that case, this workflow worked beautifully.

[glatznatureproductions]

Super video Luc. Agree 100% with everything you said - and we learned a lot of this the hard way. The DR markers are very powerful. Love how they are customizable and you can add descriptions. I use a ton of keywords when organizing footage, which is then helpful when you bring everything on to the master. But I can see how the timeline of the dailies can be helpful as well. As you said the key is going through all of your footage, trimming away the fat, and organizing it relentlessly. Thanks for sharing your process and approach.

[carbon_originals]

I saw another editor creating all the ‘selects’ and editing from there, and I have always done that. Never knew I was already making ‘Dailies.’ It’s the best way to know your footage, and find hidden gems within that give angles to your story you might have not considered.

[B-RollBooks]

Luc, you offer some of the most helpful videos I've encountered on YouTube. I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for all the hard work you put into educating beginners like me. You're the best!

[jamesharrison]

Luc ~ During the stringout phase I would suggest dropping markers on clips rather than the timeline. That way markers will transfer with the clips when moved to another timeline. Also taking the time to add a little metadata to 'keeper clips' along with clip markers aids searching and sorting.later. ... Another great vid.

[gabhoule]

How come I have sat down to make my first doc edit in Resolve an hour ago. What a PERFECT timing !

[adamleaders]

Great video. I go about it a little differently with the speed editor. Sort of the opposite of you. I drop all of the footage into the dailies timeline and as I quickly scrub through I discard what I don't need using the split and ripple delete or trip in/out. Then color code scenes. It's so fast, I fly through hours of footage. Awesome tip on dropping in music.

[BrianReyesFilm]

LUC!!! Thank you so much! This is literally going to save me a ton of time and stress! I already have the speed editor but I spend most of my time in the edit tab in Resolve.

I never thought about making dailies and using that to organize and plan the story. I recently hired an editor because I felt soooo overwhelmed with the mountain of footage and I had no idea where to start, just as you stated in this video.

I ended up spending the same amount of time fixing the problems in the videos than I would have spent if I had edited the videos myself.

Thank you for this video. I feel like such a newb! 🤦‍♂️

[erbartlett]

any tips for organizing huge b-roll libraries? i end up using lots of footage from previous projects, so i'm rarely just using the new footage i shoot.

[GlobalShutterNY]

Great approach to starting the edit - always the toughest part! Davinci Resolve makes this process even a bit easier using the Cut Page's 'Source Tape' - that lets you play through all of your footage without having to worry about advancing shot by shot... (And yes - Resolve Rules - having a single program that can do it all from edit to color and sound allows you to tweak all parts of the production without having to transfer from program to program - making tweaks and fine tuning much more seamless!)