How to Edit a Documentary Film

Video Transcript

For editing, there's all types of editing systems and you know. Basically, you know, you'll be using the one that's most affordable and most accessible to you. So, you know, it isn't like you know for your first documentary, you're going to buy fifty thousand dollar advent, you'll probably have you know an edit system that maybe cost you thousand bucks and you're doing it on your home computer but no matter how you're editing just make sure the quality is there. If you're shooting digital, got to make sure that you still have that digital signal and is you know broadcastable because if you're attaching this for this to air on television, you know, it has to look as good as what you see on TV. So, whatever, you're editing on just make sure the quality you know is maintain with your footage. If you don't have access to an edit system yourself as with you know. I said before with crew, find a local college student, find people who do this maybe for a living. You know just find some way to keep that quality or production because it's kind of defeats the point of you shot all the stuff, did all those work and how you're editing it together is really poor. Well, you know, why did you even do all that other stuff? So, editing, as with any of the other steps, is really, really, important. How do you start putting a documentary together? How do you start editing? Well, you already, you know, ahead of the game if you logged all your footage and know where everything is. So, basically, you know, you do like a paper edit a head of time and then you put in your footage and if your documentary consists of a lot of interviews and since these people are like telling a story, you need to just edit them first. Don't worry about bio. Don't worry about, you know, whatever they're talking about. You just want to concentrate on the interview. So, generally, with my documentaries, I would edit all the interviews first. I would, you know, mix them up, see how they follow. Sometimes just to make it a little bit more cohesive, I would divide them up in chapters because you know if you have all those footage and you're editing an hour, it could be a little bit overwhelming. So, you know, a couple of documentary I did I divided to like chapters like a book like what the MS documentaries, you know. One of the chapters would be "what is MS?" and then I would have the doctor and the expert explain what it was and maybe that segment was five minutes and then the next chapter will be "How Long Have You Had The Disease?" and it would go on to the people who had it for a while. So, it would be kind of segmented that way and it makes a little bit more you know cohesive and a little bit more controllable especially if this is your first documentary. You know kind of chop it up and you know do a segment at a time.

Watch these related videos

• 
  How to Prepare Documentaries for Editing

  playlist Views: 1,134

• 
  How to Edit a Documentary Film

  playlist Views: 2,429

• 
  How to Edit Independent Films

  playlist Views: 1,956

• 
  How to Edit an Indie Film

  playlist Views: 833

• 
  Preparing Your Indie Film for Edit

  playlist Views: 900

• 
  How Much Footage Does a Documentary Need?

  playlist Views: 1,323

Community Members who...

• Favorited this Video
• Rated This Video

Thumbs up or Thumbs down? Be the first to rate this video!

Top Tags