How long does it take to cut a feature?

What's a reasonable time frame for an editor (working without an assistant) to reach picture lock on a 90 min feature with a 10:1 to shooting ratio?

OMG man...picture lock?? There is no "Easy Button" on this...there are sooooooo many things that have to happen. Anyone that gives you a definitive time frame is lying to you (especially without an assistant). You could do 1 to 10 rough cuts. Transcoding. What if you need pick-ups? I work in short form and I cannot give you an answer to this question. If I could, my rate would be locked ;-)

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

The figure I seem to remember...

Studios allow the director to make their cut was about 10 weeks. How long all the FX and final studio edit takes is anyones guess. I've done it in less and on occasion a lot more (usually when too many cooks are in the kitchen ).

From our friend Wikipedia:

"In the United States, under DGA rules, directors receive a minimum of ten weeks after completion of principal photography to prepare their first cut."


Best to check with the DGA yourself.



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As mentioned. How long is a piece of string? The job in post is to tell the story as effectively as possible, and you can spend days talking about a cut. It's great if the story works right off, but that rarely happens. Once I was working on an ultra low budget telemovie, and I was cutting as they were shooting. I'm not sure if this is standard practice, but one good that came out of it was I spotted 1 missing angle on an actress and they scheduled it in as a pick up shot the next day (it could be a missing cutaway on a key prop). Naturally, after the shoot was done, we spent another week and a half refining the offline edit.



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Long form is a different world altogether. I wouldn't go there without an assistant. You may not require one full-time, but without you'll get way too bogged down in the ingest and select process on the front end, lose too much time playing out and delivering roughs during the edit, and become totally distracted with things like sourcing temp tracks, scheduling, documentation, correspondence, progress reports, taking phone calls etc. etc. throughout.

Two to three months is about average, but that will depend totally on the intricacies of the job and the approval instances involved. If there is VFX work to be farmed out, substantially longer. At any rate, and even with an assistant, you'll spend about half of your time in things like meetings, prep, screenings, revisions, playouts and various deliveries. Probably the least of your time in actual editing.

How fast are you at cutting? How good are you at finding the best takes? Editing a scene together for the best impact? How picky are the producers/director? How much will they tweak the footage? 10:1 ratio? 10 takes of each shot? Ouch.

Shot like Napoleon Dynamite (Simple shots, no VFX)...or like Transformers 2 (pretty much ONLY VFX)? How much music editing will you be doing?

How many levels of approval do you need to go through? No assistant? That means weeks of you capturing and labelling and organizing footage.

There is no set duration. But Ben is right, typically 10 weeks for a directors cut...that's a NON-FINAL locked cut, BTW.


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Gerard wrote-
[ I was cutting as they were shooting. I'm not sure if this is standard practice,]

it SHOULD be but often you get stuff dumped in your lap.

[ but one good that came out of it was I spotted 1 missing angle on an actress and they scheduled it in as a pick up shot the next day]

Absolutely critical. You save tons of money this way. That is why.

Clay wrote-
[you'll get way too bogged down in the ingest and select process on the front end]

Eh...ingest yes. Select, no, that's my job, usually with director.

Selection. Arrangement. Pacing. The tri-cornered hat of every editor.

10 weeks is good. 20 is better ;-)

- Loren

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i edit features.
yes, it is standard to be cutting during the shoot.
one tries to keep up, but generally falls a little bit behind.
in the film days you could be a week behind by the end,
these days less.

shortest edit for me was my first feature:
5 week shoot followed by 9 week edit.

subsequent films have often been 8 week shoot followed by a 16 week edit.
that's pretty generous for where i work (Australia), a 12 week edit would be more common.

so there's a pattern:
the edit after the shoot is 150% - 200% the duration of the shoot.
so throw in the assembly stage (the editing that takes place during the shoot)
and you have two and a half to three times the duration of the shoot is needed to edit.

not always the case.
my partner shot a film in Iran (4 or 5 weeks shoot), which was brought back here to edit.
7 week edit from start to end!
simple coverage, simple editing style.

they also didn't have as many screenings and feed-back session as i normally like to have.

this is all WITH an assistant.

the assistants job is a full-time one during the shoot.
capture/ingest, sync, sort, trouble shoot, etc, etc.
you can't do all that and get though the assembly at the same time.
also, you wouldn't want to do both jobs. they are very different mind-sets.

after the shoot you can get by without an assistant if you have to.
you still might need an assistant a little bit: one day a week perhaps.


good luck with it!
nick

also, it helps to have clearly defined goals.

x amount of weeks working on an assembly/ 1st cut.
x amount of weeks till your first screening for investors or test audiences
x amount of weeks till fine cut.

i personally like to have very regular screenings
one a week, or every two weeks say,
with trusted friends & colleagues who will give good feedback.


there's a lot going on in your world at the moment, Joe Riggs!

LOL...I forgot that feature editors do not work with a completely uncreative Marketing Department who doesn't know what they want until they see it...hence my apprehension to give a timeline

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

that's a good point though,
in my experience one of the most time-consuming aspects is waiting for the director to makeup their mind / adopt to necessary changes.

the less experienced they are the less willing they are to adapt their original ideas.
that's where time and the screening/feedback process are very valuable.


nick

It depends entirely on the project, genre, format, and variables involved in that.

Are you syncing, double system? Will there be assistants?

It also depends on you as an editor. Do you like to make long rough cuts, and then cut down from there?

If it's your first feature, and I'm guessing it is, if you need a time estimate - then finding out the length of time it takes for a top notch editor with 4 assistants to get to locking picture isn't going to help you much. My advice... make a loose schedule. Try to stick to it. Just set a goal for yourself based on your own pace, or based on some other deadline (a festival or whatever) and break your neck to hit that mark, but plan on revising it after you get through your first assembly with a clearer sense of the project. You can find cases where a film was slapped together in 3 weeks, and others where it took over a year. No two editors working in feature length works have the exact same process, but most pick up methods early in their career that help them get through the bulk of material. Do whatever works for you, and expect some days where you just jam through it, and others where nothing sticks.

Thanks all the feedback, yeah double system, no assistant.


They have an unrealistic expectation for a rough cut which concerns me greatly. I think I need to have a talk with them and set some realistic goals as Nick suggested. I'd like to stay on the gig as I've been wanting to cut a feature for some time now.

I think it's inevitable that you will underquote on your first feature, because even you won't really believe how long and complicated it will be before you're up to your elbows in it. There's a script right? And everyone just acted out the script bits right? Easy. Not so much.

I predict *holding fingers to forehead* you will be borderline ripped off, if not completely ripped off, and that no one else will really understand how much you put in for nothing.

But if it's not about making every second worth money, then let go and enjoy the puzzle.

Joe,

Try and get them to allow you at least 13 weeks. Tell them anything short of that WILL compromise the film. Make sure that you let them know that you need your time to sit with the material as well as time away from the material. These producers would love for us to spend 20 hours a day 6 days a week if they could get away with it.

Remember it is not just the amount of time you sit with the footage. I firmly believe that you need equal time AWAY from the footage. Reason being you need to be able to walk away, forget what you did and get a good nights rest. You have to be able to walk in the next day with a clear head, sit down and watch your work like you are seeing it how the audience is going to see it which is for the VERY FIRST TIME. This is just one reason to support a longer schedule.

Also you don't want to burn yourself out. If they can't hire you an assistant editor then they have to come to some other compromise. Tell them about the basic film making paradigm. There is good, fast and cheap. They can have only two out of the three. If they want it good and fast, then it can't be cheap.

How many hours of footage? My last feature shot over 30 hours of footage. That will take you obviously just about one week to watch everything once. You have to know that footage back and forth.

My 2 cents.

Jeff

Excellent points Jeff

in addition to this thread - have any other editors here had experience with getting and/or being insured for feature film editing either by the studio or on a freelance basis?

Many thanks,
Bluey,

I have five million dollars of public liability insurance, which I hate, in case I accidentally destroy someone's career by insulting their haircut or something, I guess...

Assuming you are fluent in FCP and guessing that this is a low budget indie film:

1. At minimum allow 6 weeks for a respectable first cut which will probably contain some "Scene Missing" and "Shot Missing" slugs.

2. Allow at least another 4 weeks for a fine cut.

3. If you are doing the sound too, allow at least 6 weeks for that including foley. Remember that you have to deliver an M&E track too. You will also probably have to deliver a 16x9 version in both NTSC and PAL and a 4x3 pan/scan version in NTSC and PAL - and the HD version.

4. If you are doing the front credits and the end crawl, allow 2 days for that. This includes getting the producer, director and as many people as possible to check for mis-spellings and changes in the first draft. I suggest doing the credits during the first cut to allow for their slow response time. Get these changes in writing by email and then send out the credits/crawl final draft and ask for signed approval.

5. After the completed film has been mastered (to tape usually) the film will have to pass QC (Quality Control). This is a requirement from distributors. You will receive a long list of technical faults from the lab which might take a day to fix.

6. My method of work is to spend a lot of time running the dailies of the scene I am about to edit and making notes of the best parts of each actor's performance. Then I cut like a whirling dervish because I have already made the most important decisions - and move on. I never actually edit for more than 5 hours per day which is about the maximum I can manage before I run out of the little creativity I possess. The rest of the day I spend looking at dailies for upcoming scenes and staring at the wall while talking to myself in a loud voice. Try to resist the temptation to endlessly run your edited scenes in a festival of self congratulation. It's self indulgent, time wasting and, I believe, actually harmful because you become numb to the scenes.

7. This list is getting far too long and I am starting to feel that I am lecturing you. Sorry, but it makes me feel important and worthy.

8. Get out of the cutting room for an hour in the middle of the day. I mean OUTSIDE, not making coffee. Walk the dog. Do something non-movie. Take a notebook because you will find that loads of ideas come to you on, say, a walk in a park. It's worth it.

9. SHORT INTERMISSION. Snacks available in the foyer at vast expense.

10. Restrain yourself from showing any impatience to your producers/director. Don't criticize the actors' performances. They don't want to hear this. Do not expect compliments. Don't tell them how difficult it was to cut a scene because there is not enough coverage. This is not information that that they wish to hear.

11. If you hit a scene where there is a matching problem - say an actor is wearing a day-glow party hat in the wide shot and not in the closeup - don't whine. Cut it two ways. One with the mis-match and one where you do your best to cut around the problem, even if it looks awful. Show them the two versions and let them decide whether to re-shoot the actor's closeup without the party hat. DON'T tell them what to do. Force them to come up with a solution.

12. Don't put drinks on the cutting room desk.

13. Have two backups of the camera files. One to be held off-site. Make sure that your auto-save is doing its thing at 20 minute intervals. Get a big thumb drive and periodically do a "save as" of the Project File to this drive and take it home with you. Keep all old Project files on this thumb drive.

14. Expect your main logic board to burst into flames at around the three week mark.

15. Expect to come in one morning and find that you can't open the Project File.

16. Have Disk Warrior handy. Have psychiatrist handy. Don't weep in front of the boss.

17. Keep telling them how great the movie is. They will love you for this.

18. If you are showing your work, try to arrange it so that there is only you and one other person present. I find that, in preview groups, one person's opinion can infect the others.

19. Phew ...

Good luck,

best wishes,

Harry.


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How did that ghastly smiley get on the end of my last message and how can I remove the damn thing?

Harry.

The forum interprets certain characters before close parenthesis/bracket as a smiley. To avoid this, put a space before the ).


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Thanks, Derek. Will do. Oh - you did it for me. Thanks very much.

Harry.