What goes into editing a short video?

I don’t begrudge our clients for imagining that editing a short video is easier than editing a long one. It makes sense until you start editing videos and discover that the editing process can be longer—and sometimes more expensive—than the shoot day itself. Even for a >2 min video.

I like to keep my event highlights videos under 3 minutes. Ideally, under 2. People have short attention spans. I use b-roll over talking heads to grab and redirect attention back to the piece over and over again, but we can only do this for so long before their brains catch on and tune out.

But this isn’t about video length. This is a post to show you a peek behind the editing curtain.

Before everything you see above is put together, an editor will have watched, cut down, and stabilized all of the footage. If you shoot a full day, often with more than one camera, this first step can be a full day(s) all of its own.

The sequence above is 1.5 min and took about 3 hours to assemble, not including cutting down the footage from two cameras.