Editing

Resolve is Fantastic

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I have been pressing on with Rough Cut Version 3 and, by last Wednesday, I was about 60% through and aiming to wrap by Friday. With Rough Cut 3, I’ve hopefully managed to:

  • Choose the strongest shots and takes
  • Sort the audio by selecting the best recordings, splitting tracks by actor and getting rid of superfluous ones
  • Refine the edits with either L-cuts or J-cuts as appropriate

Everything was shot in log, and I’ve done virtually no colour grading. Well…… I say virtually. I discovered that Resolve has a project-wide auto-grade function that you can toggle on and off, so I’ve had that enabled to make things viewable whilst I’m editing. I’ll disable it before the final grading. I’ve also done some temporary grading on particular tricky shots, so they’re roughly watchable – again, all to be stripped back before the final grade.

The aim with Rough Cut 3 is simply to get each scene technically sound and flowing reasonably well. After that, I want to stitch the whole film together again – maybe adding a few transitional shots (perhaps buildings, etc) so I can watch it without being distracted by poor sound or clumsy edits. I want to see if the overall narrative arc genuinely works.

As I said, I was optimistic about finishing by Friday. Each scene seemed to need just a bit of tidying up. Ha!

After doing all that, I tackled a scene in which two characters argue, receive phone calls, play a computer game and watch TV. Straightforward? Nah! Pretty soon, I realised I’d left the previous cut in a rather disjointed state. The scene needed a lot of work. There was a rogue film light in shot, continuity issues between takes, missing TV audio, and a need to blend sound from when the actors are physically in the room with when they’re on Zoom or on the phone – all within the same scene. I know, I know… but none of this is insurmountable. Better planning might have helped, but this is my first feature – there are some lessons you can’t learn in advance; sometimes you just have to “work the problem”.

That said, I’m getting to know Davinci Resolve far better and it is amazingly good. I’d been worried about copyright issues because several scenes had visible logos in shot. I knew Resolve could help, but I hadn’t quite appreciated just how good it is. The Patch Replacement tool is superb – you can sample a patch of the frame and lay it over the logo. And it even tracks intelligently if an actor walks in front of the logo! Fuck knows how! Similarly, I also managed to paste out a boom mic by cloning background over it, and even remove two moving cars from a country road. Blimey!

Several scenes are dialogue-heavy, and it became rather time-consuming to decide which shot/take to use for a given line. Luckily, Resolve’s AI transcription feature allows you to select specific text and flip between corresponding takes instantly. Genuinely very impressive.

I’ve also found the Smooth Cut Transition very useful. I’ve been lucky with the cast – fantastic actors, excellent performances – but there are moments when lines are held just a little too long. In some cases, this was unavoidable for technical reasons. We had a scene with four actors in one room pretending to be in separate locations on Zoom. All were mic’ed up and instructed not to talk over each other to ensure clean audio. The downside was that pauses became rather exaggerated, made worse by Zoom’s unpredictable delay of up to a second.

“Jump cuts!” I hear you cry. Yes, yes, jump cuts – very in vogue and can be great when used deliberately. But I don’t want to be forced into using them. As the framing barely changed, I was able to tighten the pauses using Smooth Cut Transitions instead, which preserved the performances without drawing attention to the edit.

So, progress with editing has slowed as I’ve reached the more challenging scenes. But I keep chipping away at it.

Wrap Party

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We had the Automatic wrap party last Saturday night at a pub in Brighton. Around 30 people turned up, including cast, crew and others who’d helped out on the film. It was a great chance to catch up after filming and talk about what we’d all been up to. Oddly, none of us seems to have taken any photos, which I’m choosing to attribute to everyone having such a good time that pictures simply didn’t occur to us.

Of course, having the wrap party doesn’t mean we’re all done and dusted. I’ve been working on the second draft of Automatic, choosing better shots and takes and tightening up the cuts. I’ve also allocated specific audio tracks for each actor, selecting the best audio and placing it on the correct track. I’m slightly torn between the technical side, trying to get everything right, and the more intuitive process of choosing which shot works best. So, my approach has been to work on the scene, improve it, but not perfect it, then move on to another. I’ve listed all the scenes in a spreadsheet along with the duration of the current version, which lets me calculate roughly how far through the edit I am. For this draft, I’m about 50% of the way through.

There are a couple of scenes which are fairly intense and I haven’t yet tackled those properly for draft 2. With the help of ChatGPT, I’m learning more about editing as I go, and my thinking is that what I learn working on the simpler scenes will benefit the more complex ones later on. I’m realising that there is much more to this editing lark than meets the eye.

For example, a J-cut is where the audio from the next scene starts before the video cuts to it, and an L-cut is where the audio from the current scene continues after the video has cut to the next. I have used these techniques to some extent and gave myself a pat on the head for being so creative. However, last week, while editing, I asked ChatGPT about this technique, and I’ve now discovered that it’s actually fairly standard practice, and that J-cuts in particular feel more natural and draw the viewer in. Suddenly, it dawned on me that this is probably the norm for most edits, and that cutting of audio and video at exactly the same point might actually seem quite clunky.

It did cross my mind to hire a professional editor who would already know all this stuff. But then I might also have hired a professional producer and a professional director. In fact, I could simply have bought some shares in Warner Brothers and gone down the pub. But I wanted to direct, and I wanted to edit – so here I am.

Last week, while editing, I realised I needed phone ringtones. I can’t use standard ones because they’re covered by copyright. I hunted around online and found a few possibilities, but I really need to stay focused on editing. So I put a call out on Facebook, and two friends came back to me. One guy I’ve known for years is a whiz with synthesisers, and he’s generated some ominous and irritating buzzing noises. Another is the son of an old sailing friend who’s just completed a degree in Film, TV and Digital Production at Royal Holloway University. He’s going to get me some tones for phones and computers.

There is also some specific music I’d love to use in the film. Although I doubted I’d be able to afford the copyright fees, I reasoned nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I contacted one of the bands and was pleasantly surprised when they replied, saying they are considering the idea. I’ve also contacted a local musician about other music, and we’re currently in discussion. I still need to finalise the voice-over for a presentation which appears in the film. I’ve got a couple of options, both of which are promising, but I need to get that scene edited so I can try out the audio properly.

As mentioned in a separate post, Chichester Film Makers have asked me to talk about Automatic and screen a short excerpt at their Winter Event on Saturday, 31st January 2026. Today, I’ve been working on a teaser trailer for that.

Tom and Julie are back from gallivanting around the Far East. Tom has completed a new version of the poster, and Julie managed to get my Chichester talk listed on the Sussex World website. Many thanks to both of them.

Last but not least, I’ve agreed an internship with a student at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. He’ll be starting very soon and will be working on social media promotion.

At the moment, I’m aiming to get Automatic into the Brighton Rocks Film Festival by the closing date of 21st April 2026.

Distracted by Editing

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Last week was relatively quiet. I admit it – after wrapping up those three days of filming, I took my foot off the pedal and started diving into the editing. Modern editing software is very powerful, but I’m realising that I understand only a fraction of what it can do.

We have been trying to use one lav mic per actor plus a boom mic, which results in multiple audio clips for every take. Syncing all of this is a task in itself. Ideally, Resolve would handle it automatically. It does have automated syncing for multiple takes and clips, but it seems to only sync one audio clip to one video clip. Last week, I started auto-syncing all audio clips for a single take with their corresponding video clip. That seemed to work, though it ends up pulling all the audio into the original video clip.

I could go on, but I’ve probably lost most readers by now, except for the real nerds. You get the idea: editing is complicated. I managed to get one scene 90% assembled and I have to say that I like it.

On a more creative note, Angela and I have been thinking about ways to break up the main scenes a bit, so we’ve been sketching out what we’re calling “transitions”.

Meanwhile, Julie got the press releases out, and we’ve already had some feedback. Sussex World has run an article, and Brighton and Hove Magazine are interested in a Q&A.

We’ve got another shoot coming up in the offices this Saturday. Many, many thanks to Mark Tournoff and Gosia Stewart of EC Brighton, who have kindly lent us their office space for filming.

Part of the reason last week felt quiet is, of course, that I started editing. It’s one of those tasks where you can easily slip into a steady state of flow, and hours just slip away. Some people edit as they go, but I’m finding that it distracts me from the remaining production tasks – so, my next priority has to be completing the filming.

A Bit of Editing & Catching the Zeitgeist

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We didn’t do any filming last week, but I’ve managed to schedule five more shoot days for later this month and into October. A few of these will require supporting artists, so I’ve contacted the people who helped out with our office shoots, along with a handful of others.

We’ve also planned more Zoom interviews with the actors, and I put together a video presentation that’ll be used in an office scene. One thing I’ve learnt from filming the computer game and Zoom call sequences is that you don’t need to capture actors watching the entire video. It’s enough to shoot them reacting to sections of it. The sound can be added later, which makes things a bit easier.

On the post-production side, I’ve started prepping media. One of our earliest shoots was up on the South Downs, near Chanctonbury Ring. We got some great visuals, but it was a windy day – the large reflector kept blowing around and two of the radio mics kept cutting out. So, although we came back with some decent material, a fair bit of it isn’t the greatest quality. The challenge now is to sift through it all, selecting the good media and avoiding the bad. Where to start? I began by syncing each take’s video with its three audio sources (two lavalier mics and one boom) in Resolve. From there, I built a “scene timeline” and broke everything down into smaller “phrases”, clip by clip, line by line.

The idea is that I can now select the best pieces and stitch them into a coherent whole. Originally, I thought I’d start with the video, but a conversation with ChatGPT has nudged me in a different direction. Apparently, when you have dialogue-heavy scenes, it makes sense to prioritise the audio first, something editors call “radio editing”. I’ll continue working on this next week.

I’ve run into tricky media before on other projects. My experience is that, with enough patience and attention to detail, you can create a good result – provided there’s enough coverage. Fingers crossed.

If you know a better way of doing this, please let me know.

On a slightly different note, I’m convinced that Automatic has captured the zeitgeist. More and more people are commenting on the bureaucratic tangle in modern society. At a party on Saturday night, I was chatting to a guy who mentioned a book called “The Unaccountability Machine” by Dan Davies. From what I gather, it argues that business and political leaders often hand decision-making over to processes, creating what Davies calls “accountability sinks”. To my mind, we see this all the time with political leaders insisting there’s no alternative to a sort of plodding, mindless managerialism. This book was well-reviewed in The Financial Times, and there’s also an interview here with Davis by Harsha Perera, which is worth a look.

This week – a shoot at a petrol station.