Two days of filming, on 17 and 18 August, came to 5 hours 16 minutes of footage across 815 clips. The brief was a 90-second video. That’s 0.47% of what was shot.
Put the two side by side and the maths is brutal: for every minute that made the cut, more than three and a half hours didn’t.
Editing is mostly leaving out
With that much footage, the job isn’t finding good shots. There are hundreds of good shots. The job is deciding which few carry the story and letting the rest go, even the ones that took effort to get.
How to get through it
- Know the story before the timeline. A 90-second video has room for one idea. Everything that doesn’t serve it goes, however nice it looks.
- Cut in passes. First a rough pass to get from hours to minutes, then again and again until only what matters is left.
- Keep the pace. At 90 seconds, a shot that lasts a beat too long is a shot the viewer scrolls past.
- Watch it fresh. After hours in the timeline you stop seeing it. Coming back to it later shows what drags.
See it for yourself
On the video page the full rushes are drawn as a bar, clip by clip, that shrinks to the edit as you scroll. Both bars use the same scale. The edit is a sliver.
Written by Joseph Carey · 29 Sep 2026