Paper edit in cinemaOS: a rough cut built from the transcript

A paper edit in cinemaOS works the way documentary editors have always worked, without the printouts. You choose transcript lines in the order you want to hear them, press Paper Edit Rough Cut, and cinemaOS assembles those lines on a new sequence, with linked sound and a little room either side of every line for trimming. Your current cut is never touched. Then you refine the rough cut word by word, in the same panel.

What a paper edit is, and why it still works

Before timelines, documentary teams printed every transcript, highlighted the lines that mattered and arranged them on a table or a wall until the story held together. Only then did anyone touch the footage. The method survives because story problems are easier to see in words than in clips: you can read a whole argument in two minutes, but watching it takes an hour.

cinemaOS keeps the idea and removes the busywork. The transcript is already timed to the media, so your order of lines can become a cut directly.

Before you start: transcripts

Open the Text-Based Editing panel in the Sequencer. If some clips have no transcript yet, the panel offers to Transcribe them. Transcription runs on your Mac, once per source, and does not create caption tracks. When it finishes, every spoken line appears in the panel with the clip name and its timecode.

Use the search field to find what was said, and the Speaker menu to show one person at a time. For long interviews, this alone saves hours.

Building the rough cut

1. Choose lines in story order. Command-click a line to add it to your choice, and Command-click it again to take it out. The order in which you choose lines is the order of the cut, so pick the opening line first, then the next, and so on. Nothing is sorted behind your back.
2. Press Paper Edit Rough Cut. cinemaOS builds a new sequence named Paper Edit with a number, and reports how many lines landed in how many clips.
3. Watch it once, straight through. A rough cut is for judging structure, not polish.

A few rules make the result easier to work with:

• Handles. Every line gets a little extra media either side, so you have room to trim and the sound is not clipped. A handle never reaches into the neighbouring spoken line of the same source.
• Neighbours join. Two lines that follow each other in the same source, chosen in order, become one continuous clip instead of two that repeat audio.
• Nothing is guessed. A line that cannot be placed is skipped with a reason, and a line chosen twice is reported instead of silently doubled.

Refining by word

Once the structure works, tighten it without leaving the text:

• Delete words. Tap the words you do not want and press Delete Words. The media is cut and the rest closes up.
• Move words. Choose a run of words, press Move Words, then pick the destination within the line. The clips are reordered exactly, with nothing lost or overlapped.
• Remove Fillers and Tighten Pauses clean the selected lines in one go. If you would rather compare, Filler-free Candidate and Trim Long Pauses Candidate build a separate sequence and leave the current cut as it is.

Each of these commands is one undo step. Captions and markers that belong to the words follow them when words move. For a deeper look at fillers, see remove filler words from an interview.

Letting J.A.R.E.D. do the first pass

If you would rather start from a proposal, press ⌘J and ask, for example, "tighten this interview to 2 minutes and keep the pauses" or "build a selects sequence". The result is a new sequence you can read and compare with your own paper edit. And when you want a whole film rather than an interview, the J.A.R.E.D. director plans and builds one from a sentence.

Tips from the edit room

• Read before you listen. Make the first pass on text alone, then watch. You will catch structure problems faster.
• Choose too much. A rough cut that runs long is easier to fix than one with holes.
• Keep one paper edit per idea. Each press of the button makes a new numbered sequence, so you can build two versions of the story and compare them.
• Check the picture last. Words decide the order; pictures decide where you cover a cut with B-roll.

For how this compares with other apps, see text-based editing in Premiere, Resolve and Descript compared.

FAQ

Does the paper edit change my existing sequence?

No. It always builds a new sequence. Your current cut stays exactly as it was.

Can I choose lines from different clips and speakers?

Yes. Choose lines from any transcribed clip in any order. The rough cut follows your order, not the order of the sources.

Is the transcript sent anywhere?

No. Transcription and the paper edit run on your Mac.

Try a paper edit on your next interview

Take one interview and build a two-minute story from its transcript. cinemaOS has a 14-day free trial with no card required.