Say four people sat for 45 minutes each for a client’s testimonial film. That’s three hours of interview for a two-minute film, and at about 140 spoken words a minute two minutes hold roughly 280 words.
An editor who goes looking for them in the timeline spends a day scrubbing, and the director still asks where the line about the first oven went. A paper edit does that search on a page instead.
In short
- A paper edit is the interview cut written out as a document, line by line with timecodes, before anyone opens the timeline.
- Read every transcript once without marking, mark the selects on the second read, then build the order.
- Play every bite you picked, because a transcript hides how a line sounds.
- Get the structure approved on paper before anyone cuts pictures.
- Mark every join and write the cover shot next to each line.
What a paper edit is
A paper edit is the interview cut written out as a document before anyone opens the timeline. Each line is a sound bite, with who says it, the file it comes from, the in and out timecodes and the words.
Next to it goes a note on the pictures that will cover it. Read from top to bottom, the document is the film’s soundtrack in order.
The practice comes from documentary and news, and it works the same way on testimonials, case study videos, founder stories and short documentaries for brands.
On a scripted job the script decides what people say. On an interview-led film nobody knows the story until someone has read what was said, and the paper edit is where it gets decided.
A few lines from a bakery chain’s brand film might look like this:
01 · INT_Marta_02 · 12:04-12:19 · “My mother opened the first shop with one oven and a loan from my uncle.”
Cover: archive photos of the first shop
02 · INT_Joao_01 · 03:37-03:48 · “I came in to wash trays. Eleven years later I run the morning shift.”
Cover: João at the ovens before dawn
03 · INT_Marta_02 · 27:51-28:02 · “We never wanted to be the biggest. We wanted the bread to taste the same in every shop.”
Moving line 03 to the top takes a second on paper. In the timeline it means recutting the cover shots and the music around both lines.
How to do a paper edit, step by step
Start with a transcript of every interview, checked against the audio at least for names and numbers. How to transcribe a video covers that part, so this post picks up with the text in hand.
Read everything once, start to finish, without marking anything. The first read tells you what the story is. If you mark from page one you’ll grab the first decent version of an idea, and people often say it better forty minutes in, once they’ve relaxed.
On the second read, mark the best lines. Write the file and the in and out timecode next to each one, and tag it with the part of the story it serves, such as origin, problem, turning point or result.
Take more than you need. Selects that run several times the final length let you change your mind later without going back to three hours of tape.
Then build the order. Copy the selects into a document, group them by tag and arrange them the way the story needs.
Count the words as you go. A two-minute film can’t carry 600 words of interview, and cutting a paragraph now is much quicker than trimming a sequence later.
Next, check that it works as speech. A transcript tidies up talk. It hides the pause before an answer and the pitch going up when the speaker hadn’t finished the thought.
Play every bite you picked. Better still, make a radio cut by laying the bites on the timeline in order, sound only, and listening without the picture, which is where most of the bad joins give themselves away.
Now send the paper edit for approval of the structure. The director, the client or both read the document and sign off on the order and the lines before anyone spends a day on pictures.
Say what they’re approving, which is the story and what each person says. Shots and music come later, in the cut. If the client wants to lose the part about the uncle, you delete a line and send it back the same afternoon.
Only then cut. The first assembly follows the paper edit line by line, and the rough cut review is where the pictures get judged.
Say in the approval message that the structure can still move until the locked cut, so nobody takes a yes on paper as the final sign-off.
Lines that read well and sound bad
The most common surprise in the assembly is a line that was perfect in the document and doesn’t work on screen. The speaker swallows the last word, or a truck passes in the middle of the sentence.
Sometimes the problem is in the picture, like a glance away from the lens halfway through. The transcript shows none of this, so watch each select when you mark it and note anything that could rule it out.
Frankenbites that change the meaning
A frankenbite is a sentence built from pieces of different sentences, sometimes from different answers. Cutting a false start or joining two sentences about the same point is ordinary editing and keeps the meaning.
The trouble starts when the join says something the person never said. Half an answer about the old system plus half an answer about the new one can produce a claim nobody made.
On a testimonial that’s a legal problem as well as an ethical one. The US Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides (16 CFR 255.1) say an endorsement may not be reworded or presented out of context so as to distort the endorser’s opinion or experience with the product.
One test covers most cases. If the person watched the cut, would they recognize what they said? Mark every join in the paper edit with both timecodes, so whoever approves the structure sees where words were brought together.
Plan the cover shots on paper
Every cut inside an answer needs a shot over it, unless jump cuts are the style of the film, and a bite that names something, like the first shop, makes the viewer expect to see it.
Write the cover next to each line, as in the example above, and check it against what was actually shot. If there are no archive photos of the first shop, find out while the structure is still on paper. The missing pictures become a request for the client’s archive or half a day of pickups.
How this works in RecReview
RecReview doesn’t assemble the paper edit, so the document stays wherever you write. The app helps you find and mark the lines.
Upload each interview as a video. Once it has a transcript, the Transcript tab shows it in paragraphs, each with its timecode and, when the voices can be told apart, a speaker label.
Every word has its own time, and clicking one jumps the player there. The search box in the tab narrows the transcript to the paragraphs that contain a word, corrections you made by hand included.
To find which interview a line came from, use the app’s global search (Cmd+K, or Ctrl+K on Windows), which also looks inside transcripts and opens the video where someone said it. It reads the transcript as first generated, so look up a corrected name by its original spelling.
To mark a select, press I at the start and O at the end, or click Mark range in the comment box, which takes five seconds from the current frame and lets you drag the edges on the timeline. A comment on a range shows its start and end in the comment list.
Shift+L loops the range, so you can hear the line a few times before it goes on paper. Anyone who can comment on the review link can do this, including a director outside your team.
For the document, the transcript exports as TXT, one paragraph per block with the time at the start, in a file named after the video you uploaded. The JSON export carries the timing of every word.
The comments themselves go to Premiere or DaVinci Resolve as markers. In the XML export from the review page a range arrives as a single-frame marker at its start, while the Premiere panel, on the Pro and Studio plans, keeps the duration. Importing comments as markers walks through both.
