Edit and Rescue of Footage You Have Already Paid For

Give us the drives and inside five working days you get an honest answer about what is on them: how many finished pieces the footage genuinely supports and how many it does not. Most archives handed to us contain one strong film and two or three cutdowns. Some contain nothing usable, and we say so in the first week rather than the eighth, because a client paying us to cut air is a client we lose. Where we start: A media audit before any edit decision. We ingest the camera originals, ARRIRAW, BRAW, R3D, XAVC, whatever the shoot ran, not the proxies your last agency left behind, because proxies hide the focus misses and the exposure that will not survive a grade. We check coverage against what the brief now wants, flag every shot carrying a rights, talent or product-version problem, and mark where the gaps are. The audit is a document you keep, and it stays useful even if you never cut the film. The work itself: Conform and edit in Resolve Studio. Sound leaves via AAF to a mixer who is not the editor, because an editor who has heard a scene two hundred times can no longer hear it. Dialogue repair in iZotope RX where the location audio is salvageable and a straight verdict where it is not. Grade to match across shoots that never matched, which in practice means the second unit on a different camera body on a different afternoon in different weather. Music licensed properly, with territory and term written to the campaign you are actually running. What we will not do: We will not upscale a 1080p source and hand it over as a 4K master. We will tell you what the source holds and let you decide. We will not build a performance out of takes that do not contain one. If the read is not on the card, no amount of assembling fixes it and the result always looks like exactly what it is. We will not quietly shoot pickups and present the result as an edit of your footage. And we do not accept briefs whose success condition is that the film performs in market. We control the cut. We do not control your media buy or your product. Who should not hire us: Anyone who wants an editor in a room taking direction shot by shot. That is a good service and it is not this one. Anyone whose archive is unlogged, scattered across two former agencies and a dead drive, unless they will pay for a recovery week first and accept hearing that some of it is gone for good. How it runs: Drives or a Frame.io transfer, plus whatever paperwork survives: call sheets, script, talent agreements, music licences. Audit, then a written recommendation of what to make and what to abandon. Then selects, assembly, and a first cut you watch with no music and no grade, because both forgive a cut that is not working and you need to see the cut. Notes, second cut, picture lock, finish. Two viewings happen before anyone discusses typography. Delivery includes the graded master, versions cut for their own aspect ratio rather than centre-cropped, a textless, the project file, and a written media map so the next person who needs one frame from this shoot finds it in an afternoon instead of a fortnight. One note on why this exists as a service. Brands in these three categories shoot expensively and then use about a third of what they bought, usually because the campaign changed after the shoot and nobody went back to the rushes with the new brief in hand. That is the gap this work sits in.