Rough cut

It looks unfinished, and it is supposed to. The editor assembles the selected shots, sets their order and pace, drops in temporary music and sometimes plain white titles instead of graphics. On a standard corporate video you see it within five to ten working days of the shoot. The sound is raw, the colours are flat, a shot occasionally hangs two seconds too long. All of that is fine, because what you are judging is the story, not the surface.

Why it matters: this is the last cheap stop. Reordering sections or dropping a whole passage costs an hour of work at rough cut stage. The same change after colour, mix and graphics means redoing everything that hung on that passage, and delivery moves three to five working days. That is why it pays to watch it properly and in one go.

How to approach it: watch the whole thing without pausing, then watch it a second time with notes. Write feedback with timecodes, for example 0:42 this line is redundant, rather than the middle feels slow. Collect notes from everyone into one document and send them at once, not in pieces across three days. One solid round on the rough cut saves two rounds later.

Where it goes wrong: the client fixates on the image being dark and the audio hissing, and reviews exactly the things that have deliberately not been done yet. The opposite mistake is worse: waving the rough cut through without really watching, then raising a fundamental objection at the final version. By then it is late, and it usually costs extra.

We send every rough cut with one line saying what is still missing, so nobody has to guess what is intentional and what is unfinished. And we ask for notes within 48 hours, because waiting longer pushes out everything behind it. Try it today: on your next cut, write nothing during the first viewing and just notice when your attention drifted.