What to say out loud while you film
The cheapest editing improvement available costs one sentence, said out loud, while the camera is already running.
You film for three hours. Six weeks later you, or somebody you pay, opens a folder of files named by the camera and starts scrubbing through them looking for the part where you explained the second stage. It takes an hour to find twelve minutes of usable material, and none of that hour improved the video.
The fix is one sentence. Before each section, while the camera is running, say where you are in the process. Out loud. On the recording, not in a notebook, because the notebook does not travel with the file and the recording does.
Who are you actually talking to?
Somebody who will watch every second of your footage.
That is the part worth holding on to, because it changes what feels reasonable to say. Whether it is an editor you have hired or you in three weeks with no memory of the day, one person is going to sit with all of it, in order, at their desk. Everything you know while filming, which take was the good one, which section you abandoned, what you meant to come back to, exists only in your head, and your head does not get offloaded from the card.
Speak to that person. They cannot hear you now, but they will.
What do you say before each section?
Where you are in the process, in the plainest words you have.
Right, base is done, now the sauce. This is the section about tuning. Second half of the lesson, hands only. Nobody is going to hear these. They are cut out along with the pauses and the throat clearing, and they exist purely so the footage stops being an undifferentiated three hours.
A cooking partner was asked to say the stage of the recipe out loud while filming, for exactly this reason. Hours of footage turned into something that could be scanned rather than watched. It saved editing time, and the whole cost was remembering to speak.
The mechanism is not clever. An editor moving through a long timeline is hunting for landmarks, and a voice saying now the sauce is a landmark that is visible in the sound and searchable in any software that turns speech into text. Without landmarks, the only way to know what is in a file is to watch the file.
What do you say when a take falls apart?
That was a mess, going again.
Say it immediately, without apologising and without explaining what went wrong, then reset and go. The words themselves do not matter as long as they are the same words every time. What matters is that the take is now marked as dead in the one place a mark survives, which is the recording itself.
Without that, every take is a candidate. The person editing has to watch all of them to the end, including the four where you fluffed the same line, because there is nothing telling them not to.
The reverse is worth as much. When you finish a take and know it is the one, say so. That was the one. It saves somebody comparing five versions of a sentence you already had an opinion about.
What is the clap for?
Lining up two files that started at different moments.
If your sound is recorded on a separate device, a phone or a small recorder rather than into the camera, you end up with a picture file and a sound file that began whenever each machine was switched on. Somebody has to line them up, and a second out is enough to make you look like a badly dubbed film.
One clap, hands high enough that the camera can see them, gives both files the same landmark: a single bright frame in the picture, and a single tall spike in the waveform, which is the drawing of the sound you see along the bottom of an editing timeline. Line up the spike with the frame and the two recordings start together. On a long take, add a second clap at the end: if the spikes still line up nothing drifted, and if they have crept apart the two devices ran at slightly different rates and the later part needs nudging back. The clap fixes the start, not the drift.
Software does this automatically most of the time. The clap is for the shoot where it does not, which is usually the noisy one, and it takes half a second.
Do take numbers help?
Only past about three.
If you are filming a piece to camera over and over until you get it, count them out loud. Hook, take four. It gives you and whoever edits it a shared way of referring to a specific take, which matters when the note you want to send is use the fourth one rather than use the one where I sounded a bit warmer.
Below three takes, skip it. You are adding a ritual to a problem you do not have, and rituals that serve nothing are the first thing dropped on a busy morning, usually along with the ones that were working.
What happens when nobody says anything
The editing time gets spent either way. That is the honest shape of it.
Footage with no spoken landmarks has to be watched in real time by somebody who cannot skip, because skipping risks missing the good take. Three hours of recording becomes at least three hours of watching before a single decision gets made. You can spend that time in advance, saying twelve short sentences while the camera is already running and the lights are already on, or somebody can spend it afterwards, in an order nobody chose, at whatever an hour of their attention is worth.
What to say tomorrow
Write four phrases on a sticky note and put it under the lens. Where I am. That was a mess. That was the one. Take number.
You will feel ridiculous the first time, alone in a room, announcing the stage of a recipe to nobody. The person who edits it, including the version of you who has forgotten the entire day, is not going to find it ridiculous at all.
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