round-ups, trailers and the month's film, cut by an editor

the short version

the weekly round-up, the launch trailer and the month in one film are now cut by an editor, not picked line by line. it reads every episode in the span at once, listens to how each moment was said, and cuts the strongest of them together the way a good editor cuts an advert: a cold open, then the story in the order that tells it best, your own screens over your voice where you are talking about them, a few of your words slammed on screen, every cut on the beat of the music. a week is 60 to 90 seconds now, the trailer about a minute, the month under two. your episodes are not touched by any of it.

why it changed

rich, who builds underway, watched last week's round-up and said what any founder would: if he handed those eleven episodes to a professional editor, they would put something far better together. the round-ups, the trailers and the monthly films are the ones that need to be cool, snappy and well edited, the highlights of each episode cleverly cut together.

he was right, and the reason was structural. the old cut asked a director to choose one or two runs of sentences from each episode on its own, blind to the rest of the week, and played them back to back in the order they were filmed. it never saw the week as a whole, never heard how a line was said, never saw a single frame. it could only pick lines. last week's came out at three and a half minutes of fifty sentences, which is a summary, not a highlights reel.

how the editor cuts it

• a quick read of each episode shortlists its moments: whole thoughts of two to eight seconds that make sense on their own, said cleanly, and only from lines still in that episode's own cut. a line you struck from an episode never comes back in a round-up.
• each moment is listened to. how loud it was, how much your voice moved, how fast you were going, against your own usual voice. the editor prefers the line said with life over the same point said flat.
• one editor then sees every moment across the whole span at once, with a still of each screen you shared, and decides the cut: which moments, in what order, which open it cold before the title card, where a screen plays over your voice, which few words go on screen big, and where your voice leads into the next picture.
• it then looks at its own cut, a still from the middle of every moment, and fixes what is wrong: a flat face, the same point made twice, a run of long lines with nothing between them, a screen that does not match the words, a weak opening. at most twice. if that look fails for any reason, the first cut stands and the file is still made.
• every cut is moved onto a beat of the music, but only inside the gap your words allow. a cut never lands inside a word to hit a beat.

what stays exactly as it was

only your words, as you said them. the editor chooses and arranges; it never writes. the words slammed on screen are copied from the moment that follows them, and a moment that has been trimmed was trimmed to a run of words you actually said in that order. every moment carries its episode and its date in the corner, written out, so nobody watching is misled about when something was said, even when the cut puts friday before monday.

the b-roll is yours too. it is the screens you shared while filming your episodes, the page, the ad, the dashboard you were talking about, played over your voice for a few seconds while you talk about it. nothing is generated. every screen is looked at first, and one showing someone else's post, your messages, an inbox or a feed is never used. a moment where the picture is too dark to see your face is never used either. and the card it opens on is named after the cut it opens, from the moments it kept.

and your episodes are the diary. they stay in the order you said things, face only, as long as the conversation ran. this is a change to the films cut from them, which are adverts for the diary, not to the diary itself.

your hand on it

on a round-up's page, the cut tab now opens with the edit: every moment in the order it plays, where it came from, how long it runs, the words that go on screen first, and the screens over your voice. take it out on any moment removes it, take the screen off removes a screen, and both come back with a press. make the file again puts your changes in the file. use the plain cut instead swaps the edit for the old line by line cut, and use the edit brings it back. recut with the editor asks for a fresh edit of the same episodes.

the edit list lives on the web, where the assembly work is. the phone plays the finished file, on the round-up's own screen, as it did.

round-ups you already have

nothing is re-cut behind your back. an existing round-up plays exactly as it did until you open it and press cut it with the editor. new round-ups, the sunday cut, the month's film on the first and the launch trailer are all cut by the editor from now on.

the week in one cut is made for you every sunday on series. start a series.