Service

What happens to a recording

Editing work on material you already own. Below is the whole of it: the five things an order can cover, what a cut actually involves, and the files that come back.

Scope

Five things an order can cover

An order covers some or all of these, and the quotation names which. Nothing outside this list is part of the service, and nothing on it is charged for separately once it is in the order.

Service 01

Cutting clips from a recording you supply

Stretches of your own recording taken out as separate pieces, each one topped and tailed so it makes sense with nothing around it.

Watching the source through and marking where a self-contained thought starts and stops.
Trimming the run-up and the trailing-off at each end, and taking out the stumbles inside where doing so does not change the meaning.
Balancing the sound between speakers so a clip is not loud in one half and thin in the other.
Grading the picture so the clips from one recording match each other.

Service 02

Reframing for the shapes you publish in

The same cut delivered in the aspect ratios you ask for: vertical, square, landscape, or more than one of them.

Reframing rather than stretching: the picture is recomposed for the new shape, and nothing is squashed to fit.
Keeping whoever is speaking inside the crop as the framing of the source moves.
Leaving the corners and edges clear where a platform puts its own furniture over the picture.
A separate export for each shape, rather than one file relied on to work everywhere.

Service 03

Captions and on-screen wording

Every word transcribed, timed to the speech, corrected by a person, and burnt into the picture or supplied as a separate subtitle file.

A first transcript made by machine, then read against the audio and corrected by hand: names, jargon and figures are where machine transcripts go wrong.
Timing tightened so a line changes on the beat of the speech and not a moment after it.
Captions set in your own type and colours, placed clear of the edges the platform covers.
Burnt-in captions, a separate subtitle file, or both, as the order asks.

Service 04

Titles, end cards and your own graphics

Opening titles, lower thirds, end cards and any logo or holding frame you supply, applied consistently across the whole set.

Titles written from wording you approve, not invented for you.
Lower thirds carrying the names and roles you give us.
Your logo, type and colours used as supplied; where you have brand guidance, it is followed.
One set of treatments used across every clip in an order, so a run of clips reads as a run.

Service 05

Choosing the excerpts, where you ask for it

You can send timecodes and we cut to them, or we can watch the recording, propose the stretches worth cutting, and wait for your approval before editing.

Where you send timecodes, we cut to them and tell you if one of them runs across a thought.
Where you ask us to choose, we send back a written list of proposed stretches for you to approve, change or reject.
Editing starts only once the list is agreed, so nothing is cut that you did not choose.
The choice of route is yours per order, and it changes the work, so it is one of the things a quotation is built from.

The cut

Where a clip begins and ends

A clip that needs the rest of the recording to make sense is not a clip. The first and last few seconds are what decide whether it does.

Where it starts

A clip opens on the first words that mean something on their own. The question that prompted the answer is either included or written into the opening title, so nobody has to have seen the rest.

What comes out of the middle

Stumbles, restarts, long pauses and asides that lead nowhere, where taking them out does not change what was said. Where a cut would change the meaning it is left in, and we say why.

Where it stops

On the end of the thought, not on the next breath. A clip that runs a second past its ending finishes on nothing.

How it sounds

Levels matched between speakers and across the set, so nothing is loud in one clip and thin in the next. Steady background noise reduced where it can be without leaving the voice sounding processed.

How it looks

Exposure and colour matched across clips from the same recording. This is correction, not a look invented for you: if you have a grade you use, send it and we work to it.

What is never done to it

Words are not reordered to make somebody appear to say something they did not say, and nothing is cut to change the sense of an answer. If a stretch only works by being rearranged that way, we say so and leave it out.

Handover

What comes back

Files, by email or on a download link. Nothing is posted, nothing is published on your behalf, and nothing needs an account with us to open.

Out of one recording A set of finished files

The clips: MP4 files, H.264 video and AAC audio, at the frame rate of the source unless the order says otherwise. One file per clip per shape.
Captions: Burnt into the picture, or as a separate SRT or VTT file that can be switched off, or both. The order says which, and both can be asked for.
Naming: A naming scheme agreed before the first handover, so files arrive in an order you can work with rather than in the order they were exported.
A master, if you want one: A higher-quality export for archiving or for re-editing later. It is larger and it is optional, so it is agreed in the quotation rather than assumed.

Turn your video into clips Shapes and captions in detail