Editing a documentary with AI: from many interviews to a story you can cut
FlashCut helps documentary editors with the work before the edit: logging hours of interviews, pulling selects and finding the story. It transcribes and labels every speaker, logs each shot, searches the project by what was said or shown, proposes several narrative cuts to compare, and exports the chosen one to Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro.
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Why documentary footage is slow to edit
A documentary rarely rests on one interview. A typical project holds several subjects, each recorded for an hour or more, plus cutaways shot on location. Before anyone can say what the film is about, someone has to watch all of it, transcribe it, log it and pull selects.
The story usually turns up in that logging pass: two subjects describe the same event differently, or a line from the third interview answers a question raised in the first. Finding those connections by scrubbing is slow, and keeping track of them in a spreadsheet or on paper is error-prone. Most of the time goes into knowing the material, not cutting it.
What FlashCut does with a documentary project
- Transcribes every interview and labels each speaker, so the whole project reads as text.
- Logs footage on arrival with shot type, scene and location, sorting interviews to A-roll and cutaways to B-roll.
- Searches across every video in the project by what was said or what was shown, so you can find the third person who mentioned the flood without remembering which file it was in.
- Finds every shot of a specific person through face recognition.
- Proposes several narratives from the footage: storylines built from soundbites that belong together, each at 90, 60 and 30 seconds.
- Lets you edit by transcript, cutting a selects reel or stringout by reading instead of scrubbing.
A workflow from logging to hand-off
- Upload every interview and cutaway from the shoot into one project. FlashCut transcribes and logs each file as it arrives.
- Read the transcripts and search the project to learn the material. Search for a topic, a phrase you half remember, or a person, and jump to each moment.
- Choose Get Narratives. FlashCut analyzes the footage and returns several storylines, each a different angle on the material.
- Open each narrative to see its soundbites and where they sit in the footage. Treat them as candidate stringouts: one may follow a single subject, another may set two voices against each other.
- Assemble the narrative you want to develop into a cut. Each assembled narrative gets its own timeline, so several story angles can sit side by side in the project.
- Refine the cut by chat (“open on the line about leaving home”, “drop the second answer about funding”) or trim it in the transcript.
- Export Premiere Pro XML or FCPXML and continue the edit in your editing software.
Trying several story angles before committing
The expensive mistake on a documentary is committing early to a structure that does not hold up. Because FlashCut proposes several narratives from the same footage, you can compare angles before investing days in one. A narrative is a starting point, not a final structure: it shows which soundbites can carry a story and how they read in sequence.
The 90, 60 and 30-second lengths are useful well beyond social cutdowns. A 90-second narrative works as a test of whether an angle holds together, and the shorter versions often become a trailer, a pitch reel for funders, or a teaser for the festival submission.
Handing off to Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro
FlashCut is built for the first pass, not to replace your editing software. Premiere Pro XML and FCPXML exports reference your original footage rather than copying it, so the hand-off takes seconds and nothing is re-encoded. Your editor may ask you to relink media on first open. Color, sound mix, archival, graphics and final structure all happen in your editor. FlashCut does not export to Avid or DaVinci Resolve today.
Where FlashCut fits and where it doesn’t
FlashCut fits documentaries carried by people talking: interview-led films, profiles, oral histories, corporate and nonprofit documentaries. Narratives are built from what people say, so the more of the story lives in interviews, the more useful they are.
It is a weak fit for observational or verité films where the story lives in images and action with little dialogue, for archive-heavy films, and for anything that needs a finished structure with music and graphics. FlashCut still transcribes, logs and searches that footage, but it will not find a story in pictures alone.