Editing & montage
Cuts, cutaways, pacing, cold opens, and letting an agent edit real footage.12 entries.
Analyse once: sidecar files beside the sources, shooting time from the container
The storage rule that makes a long film possible a month later: each clip's shots, frame scores, beats and speech live in a file beside it, and shooting time comes from the container metadata.
Cold open, then hook: 8-10 s of best frames, hand-picked from a contact sheet
The opening that holds a viewer on real footage: 8-10 s of the strongest frames with no speech, then one line with a twist. What to look for on the sheet, and why the automatic pick is wrong.
The critic pass: repeats and sagging scenes first, mid-word joins second
A two-pass review prompt for a subagent or a second session: pass one on structure (repeats, sagging scenes), pass two on joins (mid-word cuts, audio seams). One read finds one kind of problem.
A contact sheet of every cutaway with its line under it
The one-page check that catches off-topic cutaways before anyone watches: every cutaway frame in a grid, its sentence under it. Measured once: 12 of 54 automatic cutaways were off topic.
The cutaway rule: what is said, same place and time, never over moving lips
Three constraints for every cutaway in a talking film, and the agent prompt that applies them to a transcript. Kills what viewers read as broken: a picture from elsewhere, a face out of sync.
The day as one text file: an agent reads the speech and proposes the story
The step before any timeline: the day's speech in shooting order, numbered by clip and sentence, read by an agent like a scriptwriter. It proposes story, scenes, hook and cutaways; you argue in text.
Length follows the material: cut stammers and repeats, not thoughts
The decision rule for how long a film should be. A target length makes you stretch a thin day or chop a full one; the material decides, and the checklist says what may be removed.
Promise and payoff: find the pairs that thread a multi-day film
An agent prompt that reads several days of transcripts and pairs every promise ('tomorrow we'll buy the boat') with the moment it is kept or broken, so the film has a thread, not a sequence of days.
Read the film as text before rendering: the last check that costs nothing
The cut, printed as its lines in order, read by someone who never saw the raw footage. Catches the question whose answer was cut, the name said before the person, the 'this' that points at nothing.
Scenes, not best phrases: keep the lead-in, the talk and the reaction
Why a reel of good lines confuses everyone who was not there, and the checklist for keeping a scene whole: the lead-in, the talk, the reaction, with filler trimmed only at the ends.
Take something from every clip, and list the ones you cut with a reason
A rule for cutting someone else's footage, or your own from a year ago: each clip was filmed because it mattered, so each gets a chance, and the rejects get a written reason the person can argue with.
Voice as one continuous track, pictures on top, and the one-frame length check
The assembly rule for talking films: cut the audio from the same pieces as the picture, snapped to frames, then verify film length equals voice length. Drift over one frame is a bug, not a quirk.