Editing your own scene: what happens between the shoot and the upload

Everything written about editing assumes you came home with fifty clips. A wedding, a product review, a vlog — lots of short pieces, and the work is assembling them. That is not what an adult shoot gives you. You come home with a handful of enormous continuous files, shot mostly by one of the two people who are in them, and the job is not assembly at all. It's finding the good stretches inside something you already lived through once.

I've written about what a shoot day actually involves and put a number on it — a good 25-minute scene is 25 to 40 hours end to end. Most of those hours are the part nobody photographs. Here's what they are.

What do I edit on?

DaVinci Resolve, free tier. I've never needed the paid one.

I'm not going to re-argue the software choice here, because I've already laid out the four real options and what each is good for in the equipment guide — that post is the one to read if you're still picking. The short version of why I landed on Resolve: the colour tools are excellent, the free tier does everything I've needed it to, and there's no subscription quietly draining a card every month while I'm not shooting.

The advice in that post I'd repeat hardest is the boring one. Pick one and stay on it for at least a year. Switching editors costs you a month of speed every time, and speed is the entire game when you're also the person who shot it, booked it and has to upload it.

What does the post-production pipeline actually look like?

Backup first, on the day, before anything else. Two physical drives plus encrypted cloud. Lose the only copy and you haven't lost an edit, you've lost the shoot — the people, the day, the money, all of it. Then rough cut over two or three days, colour and audio over another two, then thumbnail, copy, tags and upload, then promo cuts derived from the same footage.

That's the shape. The part worth expanding is the rough cut, because it's where the time actually goes and it's the least like what a tutorial prepares you for.

Why is selection the actual work?

Because assembly is trivial and finding the material isn't. A continuous take doesn't hand you scenes, it hands you a duration. Somewhere in it there are the stretches that work, and your job is to locate them in footage you can't skim the way you'd skim a normal timeline — you have to watch it.

There's a specific difficulty here that's mine and not the tutorial's fault: I was in it. I'm not watching this footage cold, I'm watching it against the memory of being in the room. What feels good and what looks good on camera are not the same thing — that's true while you're shooting, and it's just as true watching it back.

The practical version: watch it once end to end and mark, don't cut. Get the whole thing into in-and-out points before you make a single edit decision. Cutting while you're still discovering the footage is how you end up three hours in with a beautiful two minutes and no idea what else you have.

Should I shoot and export in 4K or 1080p?

Shoot 4K, deliver whatever the platform actually needs — which is usually 1080p, and that's fine.

The reasoning is one-directional and it's the whole rule: it's easy to scale quality down and impossible to scale it up. A 4K master gives you a 1080p deliverable any time you want one, plus the room to crop or reframe without falling apart. A 1080p master gives you 1080p forever. So the extra card space and the slower timeline buy you options you can't buy later.

That said — 4K isn't always necessary and I'd rather someone shot a well-lit 1080p scene than a badly-lit 4K one. The resolution is the least important thing in the frame. If your machine chokes on 4K timelines, that's what proxies are for, and the decision rule is simply whether the timeline plays back smoothly. If it does, don't bother. If it doesn't, generate proxies and stop thinking about it — this is a solved problem with good documentation and there's nothing adult-specific about it.

How do I export?

MOV, a high-quality codec, and mostly Resolve's own defaults for a quality export. I don't use the platform presets — the YouTube button, the Vimeo button, any of that. I set it manually.

That's less sophisticated than people expect and it's deliberate. A high-quality manual export gives me one master I can derive everything else from, which matters when the same shoot has to produce a full scene, a trailer, and a pile of short promo cuts. A preset is a decision made for a delivery target somebody else picked; I'd rather make it once, myself, and reuse the result.

I've never had a platform reject an export doing it this way.

What about file size limits?

Around ten gigs is the practical ceiling. Get under it and you're fine nearly everywhere.

Different platforms publish different numbers and the web contradicts itself badly on this. I could give you a table. I'd be making half of it up, so instead here's my working rule: ten gigs is the number that keeps me out of trouble. A 20-to-30-minute scene exported at 4K has fit comfortably under it every time for me.

If you do come in over, dropping the delivery to 1080p solves it immediately and costs you almost nothing a viewer will notice — which is the other reason the 4K master is worth having.

Worth knowing: file size isn't a straight function of runtime. How much editing is in it, how many transitions, what sound work got layered in — all of that moves the number, and compression behaves wildly differently between codecs. Two scenes the same length can export to very different sizes. Check the file, don't estimate it.

What can't be fixed in post?

Lighting and audio, mostly — which is exactly what the equipment guide says to spend your money on, and the reason it says it.

The limits here aren't adult-specific and they're well documented anywhere people shoot video: underexposure and mixed colour temperature are both far cheaper to avoid on set than to chase in a grade, and the same goes for room noise in a mix. Post can rescue a lot. It can't invent what the sensor never recorded.

I'm putting it in an editing post because it's a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Every hour spent fixing something in Resolve is an hour you could have not spent by moving a lamp. The edit is already the longest part of the week; the fastest way to shorten it is to shoot something that doesn't need saving.

What actually separates a good cut from a mediocre one?

Selection. Everything above is craft you can learn from documentation, and none of it is what separates a scene that works from one that doesn't. The cut is where you decide what the day was. Twenty minutes exist because you chose them out of six hours, and the choosing is the authorship — more than the camera, more than the grade, more than any setting in this post.

If you want the version of this that covers the hours around the edit instead of the edit itself, the twenty minutes you see is that. And if you're still assembling a kit, the equipment guide is where I'd start, because the decisions you make there are the ones that determine how much of this you have to do at all.

— Sly