Your editing woes (and costs) will diminish as your communication technique with your video editor improves. CNN Editor and producer Eric Wolfram tells us the best way to communicate with a video editor

The Problem: When you have footage that is visual, it’s easy to specify. You can say, “get the video of the elephant”, for instance, and the editor can scrub through an hours worth of footage quickly and find the elephant. But if you have an hour long interview, and you say “get the video where he says ‘we love the product because it helps us get work done’, then this could take a whole hour for the video editor to find, because he might have to listen to the whole interview. This is slow.

The Solution: Use timecode to specify sound exactly. The editor will need four things: File name, timecode (TC), in cue (IC) and out cue (OC). For the purpose of this tutorial, timecode is the amount of time in minutes and seconds since the start of the video. In cue and out cue are the words that the person is saying at the beginning or end of the section of video that you want to specify. So to specify a section of video it would look like this example:

Gesser.mov
TC 16:52 IC “the politician in canada” — OC 18:51 “havent seen before”

That would specify a 2 minute portion of the Gesser interview in a precise clear way. Please note that there is a timecode on the out cue. This is necessary, in particular, if you’re specifying large chucks of time — say over a minute of video. If the sound bite is short, say under 20 seconds, the OC timecode isn’t always needed. Also notice, that on longer pieces, you didn’t need to type the entire thing the person says to specify the entire piece of video you want.

A Single Email With All Change Requests
Ideally, all requests are specified this way in a single document in writing. In fact, any change requests can be made to a video in a similar way. The best way to provide clear change requests in a single email or document. For instance:

interview-john.mov
TC 15:22 – Remove IC “where are we going…” OC “never again.”
TC 34:23 – sound of question needs boosting
TC 54:30 – add the attached graphic
TC 33:30 – please start with our logo attached
TC 33:35 – please add lower 1/3 graphic with NAME – TITLE

So if you really want to speed up the process, you can help your editor by giving him or her the information needed to work quickly.