What to Send Your Editor: A Footage Handover Checklist
Answers what to send a video editor footage
A delayed edit is almost never a slow edit. It is an edit that started three days late because the footage arrived twice, the audio came separately, and nobody knew which card held the good take. The handover is the cheapest place in the whole production to save money, and it is the part that gets the least attention.
Before you export anything
Decide who makes the selects. If you want to send everything and let the editor find it, that is a legitimate choice with a price attached, and it should be said out loud rather than discovered. If you are sending selects, send them as a separate folder with the keepers marked, not as a note in a message.
Check that the good take exists on the drive. The single most common handover failure is a card that was wiped after a backup that did not finish. Verify by opening a file, not by reading a folder listing.
Find the audio before the editor does. Separate recorder, camera scratch, lapel, room tone. Name them.
The folder structure to send
One folder, no archive files, this shape:
- 01_video: camera originals, one subfolder per card or per camera
- 02_audio: separately recorded sound, plus a folder of room tone
- 03_graphics: logos as vector, any brand fonts, any licensed music with its licence
- 04_reference: anything that shows the look or the pace you are after
- 05_documents: the brief, the shot list, the script if there is one
- README.txt: the one file that saves the most time
Do not zip it. A zip makes it impossible to start work while the rest copies, and it hides the structure that tells the editor what they are looking at.
What the README should say
Six lines. Frame rate and resolution. The camera's colour profile. Which audio file matches which video file. Anything shot that should be ignored. Anything shot that is a favourite. Whether proxies already exist.
The frame rate line matters more than it looks. Footage shot at twenty-four and delivered at twenty-five, or the reverse, produces drift that is invisible in a short clip and obvious in a long one, and finding it after the cut is built is expensive.
What not to send
A drive with no free space. Reserve at least the size of the footage again for the project, proxies and exports.
Files renamed by a phone. Unless there is a reason, keep the camera's own filenames, because the matching audio and the embedded timecode depend on them.
A link that expires in three days. Long jobs outlive short links. Send a drive or a long-lived location.
How to send it when the file is too big
If a courier is impractical, the order matters: send the video first, then the audio separately, then the graphics and the documents by message. The edit can begin once video and reference are present; waiting for the perfect single transfer is how a Monday start becomes a Wednesday start.
The five-minute version
Frame rate, resolution, colour profile, audio matching, and the location of the good take. If the editor has those five things, they can start immediately and they will not have to ask. If they have to ask, they will ask twice, because the first reply will take a day.
If you would rather have it handled, the work page shows the kind of footage this happens with, and the contact page will take the details.