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rough cut definition
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I think it’s a good time to establish a good working & communication relationship with your director at this point. Afterall, as an editor, communicating & negotiating with your director in the spirit of cooperation is also a very valuable skill.
Since you mentioned he’s quite new to the process, perhaps you could walk him through the various stages of cuts he should be expecting as part of a docu workflow. Possibly explain to him why a workflow is important. Sometimes, for someone unfamiliar with the process, they might not understand why you can’t just tweak everything nicely for the first cut.
Usually we have to do this sort of ‘workflow education’ with clients & they’re generally open to our expertise. Since this chap is a director-to-be, i think it’ll help him a lot to know of the post stages.
Kai
FCP Editor / Producer with Intuitive Films
https://kai-fcp-editor.blogspot.com
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At Intuitive Films, We Create: TV Commercials, Documentaries, Corporate Videos and Feature Films
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Well, someone has to post this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MNg3sSZ9F8
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I had never bumped into that one before, too funny!
Thanks for the laugh.
Ron Lindeboom
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Look, this is a dynamic business.
And this is a dynamic question.If you’re working on storytelling of some form, then yeah, a LOT of stakeholders can’t understand anything other than the near-finished approach.
OTOH, if you’re working on a piece driven by talking heads and cutaway info-graphics – and the client requests a first cut knowing that they haven’t finished the product mock-ups so that all you’re going to have is a series of grey slates with “Insert shot of Widget A here” then there’s little downside to that kind of rough cut.
They get to see the folks on-camera and decide if the VO/performances do the job – AND even an idiot confronting a grey screen with those words will accept that the visual is going to change.
Please remember, this is HARDLY EVER a one solution works for everyone business. JUDGEMENT is a good thing. Use it.
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Some clients just can’t visualize based on incomplete product, and you just have to make it policy that those types don’t get to see a truly “rough” cut because they just won’t understand or get past the “unfinished” parts. The same types also have a hard time working in a non-linear manner, and freak out in the edit bay if you skip forward to work on the middle or end with finished elements, leaving an unfinished element in the beginning. Even though what you’re doing is faster and more efficient with their time and money, they want to plod along in A, B, C, D fashion. Like someone with OCD, they will preoccupy their minds fretting about the “hole” you left in the program until you go back and patch it. I had clients like that even back in the linear tape days. A checkerboard assembly used to blow their minds. Heck, a tape pre-view edit would, come to mention it.
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I worked with a first time director on a doc recently. She wanted to guide the editing from the start. I explained to her how this first cut would work and she seemed fine with the explanation: audio levels all over the place, wrong colors, rough in and outs etc. So off we go and not 5 minutes in she’s asking why does it look / sound / feel that way. I got to the point where I understood that she wasn’t going to be able to see past these items so I would clean up as much as I could to help her be able to watch edits without stopping all the time.
On another occasion I was working with a long- long time director who could see past things that just bugged the heck out of me. He would tell me don’t worry about, it’s fine, move on. He had things under control and finished quickly.
In these cases the directors were in the room with me so that really affects the process. Newbies want it all laid out cleanly and the more experienced don’t need that degree of finesse to “see” what they’re looking at.
Mark
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that one was done out of frustration.
…after sending a rough cut, of course. lol
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[Mark Alexander] “Newbies want it all laid out cleanly and the more experienced don’t need that degree of finesse to “see” what they’re looking at. “
I think your post offers excellent examples that point out exactly how the meaning of two words can be so very differently interpreted. However, I don’t think the two different interpretations of rough cut always relate to the amount of experience of the supervising producer or director — more often, it relates to the type of experience they have had, and whether they have managed projects for broadcast TV or some other aspect of media production requiring collaboration with strict deadlines.
In a studio or broadcast environment, where upper-level managers are spread thin and have very little time, they demand to see the story developed as fast and as efficiently as possible, with a beginning, middle, and end, and they simply assume the holes can be filled and the polish applied later. In situations where the supervisors have not worked in a studio-type environment with that kind of pressure, most have no idea how to work efficiently in post, and it’s up to the editor to try to educate them, if possible, or to just go go along with them if they refuse to learn a better way.
It can be very frustrating, especially if you know a better way, but you’re forced to work in ways that are very inefficient.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
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Is this a scripted or unscripted documentary? If it’s unscripted you just signed up for a huge endeavor and I’m guessing that they’re expecting something presentable.
I have yet to be able to show anyone a true “rough” cut based on the definition.
A lot of people (particularly in the reality/documentary) genre, consider a rough the main cut prior to color correction, animation and soundmixing. They’re not really expecting anything terribly rough. More of the cut that would be screened prior to the online process.
Anyway, I’m just guessing. It’s impossible to know what your client’s expectations are. But find out and report back!
Rebecca
“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” – Bob Dylan
Rebecca Gillaspie
Producer/Editor
rgillaspie@gmail.com -
Our “rough cuts” for the reality series R5 Sons, Alaska go to the Executive Producers once we have an edit that is “95% there”. This means that it will run a little long… up to a minute, but other than that it is final with a rough sound mix and no color correction. Once we get feedback from the EPs and make any small changes we tighten the edit up to proper time for a 1 hour episode (51:29:29) and it is ready for color and sound mixing. This is the process that works for us and it has been agreed upon by all parties so there are no surprises. They also give us extraordinary latitude to write and edit each episode and are not “sit in the edit suite and watch over your shoulder while you edit” kind of folks. They trust us to put out a great product and we run with it.
Each project and EP is different and it is a good idea to work out the work flow in Pre Production to manage their expectations… but this is still not always a perfect plan and each client / EP must be handled differently.
Richard Cooper
FrostLine Productions, LLC
Anchorage, AlaskaEveryone has a story to tell.
https://www.FrostLineProductions.com
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