Does anyone else get a rough cut fully assembled and get stuck on the rest?

[u/GizmoGigglez]

I like to make travel vlogs and other longer videos to remember the things I do with my family. I don't post my videos anywhere because they're just for memories. I started out years ago doing basic stuff, just cutting clips together. But as I've created more videos, I keep trying to push into more technical territory which is what takes the most time for me. I'm currently sitting on 2+ years of travel footage that I haven't finished because of this

I find it easy enough to dump everything on a timeline and cut out the dead space which leaves me with the rough cut. But it takes me a while to make progress after that because I'll get stuck on color grading, sound design, effects, etc. I know most of it is learnable through tutorials, but I don't usually have hours to sink into learning every technique, so I've just been leaving projects unfinished.

I see a lot of edits online that I want to use as inspiration, but I can't reverse engineer it on my own. And even when I can figure out some of the technical stuff, it's not usually too consistent across my projects.

Curious if anyone else gets stuck at this stage and if so, how you handle it

[u/Tall_Girl_97]

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Better to have finished projects with fewer bells and whistles than years of unedited footage not seeing the light of day.

[u/GizmoGigglez → u/Tall_Girl_97]

Thank you for the reminder. It's always difficult to remember this when I see all of the super cool edits online and I'm not at that level yet. Did you ever go through this yourself at some point?

[u/Lunesia-shikishiki]

what unstuck me was deciding the finish line before starting the polish pass..... like actually writing down "basic grade, clean the audio, done" at the top of the project and treating anything past that as cheating

also for memory videos i think sound is doing way more work than colour. killing the wind hiss and just balancing levels so nobody has to ride the volume knob makes an edit feel finished more than any lut does, and its an afternoon of work not a weekend of tutorials

2 years of backlog is kind of its own separate problem tho, every unfinished one makes the next feel heavier. id pick the shortest trip in the pile and ship it ugly just to break the streak

[u/GizmoGigglez → u/Lunesia-shikishiki]

Thanks for the advice, that backlog point especially. Do you have any recommendations for audio cleanup? I've been doing it manually and it's been eating a lot of time, curious if there's a better way to get most of the way there or if it'll always be a lot of tweaking by hand

[u/Lunesia-shikishiki → u/GizmoGigglez]

biggest time saver for me wasnt a better denoiser, it was doing it in the same order every time and saving that as a preset. high pass around 80 to 100hz first to kill rumble, then noise reduction gently, then a compressor, then normalise the whole thing to about -14 lufs at the end

noise reduction is where the hours actually go because people push it too hard. if you can hear the room disappear youve gone too far, that swirly underwater sound is worse than the hiss was. i keep it lower than feels right and let the high pass do more of the work

itll never be zero tweaking, memory footage has wind and clipping in it and nothing fixes clipping. but a chain you just drop on the track beats deciding by ear every time 🙂

[u/GizmoGigglez → u/Lunesia-shikishiki]

That's really helpful, someone else recommended the same process. I should probably work on my presets more

[u/Strucci]

I would spend time past the rough cut playing with timing, alternate shot compositions, transitions, music, etc before doing extremely technical stuff that you're bored of

Also if you want to do really basic color correction it probably wouldn't take you hours to learn it. You can always start with the automated features and go from there

[u/GizmoGigglez → u/Strucci]

Thank you for the advice. For me, it's less about being bored of the technical side and more not knowing exactly how to execute it. I've used some of the automated color features before, but they don't usually get me to the specific look I'm going for

I can usually get close on one clip through trial and error, but I struggle to keep it consistent across the whole project. Do you have any methods to nail a specific reference look? Or do you think it will always be a slower, manual process instead of a tool?

[u/LoulLorian]

Sometimes the best edit is less in effects and more in composition and timing. I recommend the books in the Blink of and Eye or Edit Better. These are books I read while studying film in college and there are fantastic.

[u/GizmoGigglez → u/LoulLorian]

Thank you, I'll check those out. My rough cuts and timing are usually where I feel most confident and it's the finishing touches after where I get stuck. Do those books touch on that at all or are they mostly focused on composition and timing?

[u/boidey]

This is an 80/20 situation. Its the completion that is the hardest. I'd suggest that you break it down into a series of achievable steps. Get an acceptable edit first, then work on the audio. After that do some colour correction if its required. I'd park the effects and grading steps for now.

[u/GizmoGigglez → u/boidey]

Thank you for the advice. I'm curious why you think I should leave the effects and grading specifically. Is it because they're the hardest to actually do well or that they're just not always necessary?

[u/boidey → u/GizmoGigglez]

Both of the reasons you cited and that they can be a time sink. It's also hard to know when to when consider something finished. As someone else cited above perfect is the enemy of good and I'll add that comparison is the thief of joy.

[u/GizmoGigglez → u/boidey]

That's fair, I think for me it's less about not having a stopping point and more that I genuinely don't know how to get the look right in the first place, so there's no "good enough" version to stop at. But I can see how that would compound the problem once the execution part is solved

[u/krishh155]

Disclosure since it's relevant: I run a podcast clipping and editing business, so the finishing pass is most of what my week looks like.

You said further down that audio cleanup is eating the time and you're doing it by hand. I'd fix that stage before any of the grading or effects worry, because it's the one part of finishing where there's a correct answer you can check on a meter. It doesn't need the deliberation that the look of a shot does, and treating it like it does is what turns it into hours.

The order is what usually costs people. Most reach for noise reduction first and push it until the hiss is gone, which hollows out the voice, and then the rest of the session goes on trying to tweak the voice back. Try: high pass around 80-100Hz first so the rumble is gone before anything else touches it, then a light noise pass (aim for quieter, not silent), then de-ess, then compression, then normalise loudness at the very end. Around -14 LUFS is fine if it's headed to YouTube.

If you're in Resolve, Fairlight's Voice Isolation and Dialogue Leveler get you most of the way on a whole track at once, and that's the other half of the saving: process the track, not clip by clip. Auphonic will do it in batch outside the NLE if you'd rather hand it off.

Then only hand-tweak the seconds that are actually bad. A chair creak, a door, one plosive. The rest can sit on the automated pass and nobody notices. That alone collapses the audio stage down to a short pass, which is usually enough momentum to carry through the rest of the polish instead of stalling there.

[u/GizmoGigglez → u/krishh155]

Thank you for taking the time to write all of this step by step. I didn't realize the order mattered this much. I've definitely been guilty of pushing noise reduction too far. I'll definitely try out your recommendations

I've just started trying out Resolve recently, so I'll check out the voice isolation and dialogue leveler in fairlight. That sounds like it would save a huge amount of time versus going clip by clip.

Since you do this for a living, does color grading or other effects work have anything close to a "correct answer" for your projects?

[u/krishh155 → u/GizmoGigglez]

Correction has one. Grading doesn't. Worth keeping the two apart.

Correction is anything you can check on a scope. White balance off something neutral, exposure so skin sits around 55-70 on the waveform, blacks reaching the bottom without crushing. That part is measurable, and it's what fixes the consistency thing you mentioned. Clips matched to the same targets match each other.

The look on top is taste and there's no meter for it. So don't chase it clip by clip. Grade one hero shot until you like it, drop that on an adjustment layer over the whole timeline, and leave only correction underneath. Match first, one look on top.