By department · Editorial
You are cutting a copy of something that physically exists.
The edit itself is an ordinary digital edit. What changes is what the files point at, and the responsibility that comes with it.
The full chain — scan, keykode, conform, grade — is on its own page. This is the part that lands on the cutting room.
For the assistant editor
Four habits.
Keep the keykode with the media
Always, from the first day. It is the link between your timeline and the original negative. An edit that loses that link is expensive to rebuild and the cost lands at the worst possible point in the schedule.
The scan is a copy. The negative is the original
Say it to yourself until it is reflex, because it changes what you treat as precious and what you treat as replaceable. It also means a scan can be redone, better, years later — an argument you may one day have to make to a producer.
Dailies arrive tomorrow, and they are trusted
Not a preview. Once negative is processed and scanned, what you are given is the actual image in a viewing condition that can be relied on — which the monitor on the floor never was.
Sync, agreed in prep
Timecode, clapper, or both. Get into that conversation with the sound recordist and the camera department during prep rather than sorting it out on the first day of rushes.
For the editor
The material behaves differently because the set did.
Fewer takes, more considered ones, less coverage of the search-and-find kind. Some editors love it and some find it constraining, and both reactions are reasonable. What is not optional is knowing before day one which kind of material is coming.
