Briefing skute

There are two kinds of request, and knowing which one you are making gets you a better result.

Whole cuts#

"Build a 30 second reel from the Iceland footage. High energy. Cut it to the music."

For a request like this, skute designs the whole edit in one go. It searches your library, picks the actual clips, sets the pacing, puts the cuts on the beat, grades each shot, and lowers the music under anything that speaks. Then it watches the result and fixes it before you see it.

Three things make this land:

• What it is for. "High energy" and "let it breathe" produce very different cuts.
• How long. A target length changes every pacing decision it makes.
• What is fixed. "Open on the drone shot." "No captions." "Keep the interview audio."

You do not need to name clips. It can find them.

Small fixes#

"The third cut is a beat too long." "Move the title up, it is sitting on her face." "Warm up the second half."

These go straight through. No plan, no ceremony. One change, checked.

What actually helps#

Say what is wrong, not what to type. "The intro drags" beats "trim clip 2 by 400ms". The first lets skute fix the cause. The second assumes you already worked out what the cause was.

React to what you see. The quickest loop is watch, say the one thing that bothers you, watch again.

Say why, not just what. "Keep it under 30 seconds, it is a pre-roll" gets a better cut than the length on its own, because it changes where the hook goes.

Where it is straight with you#

skute reports what actually landed, not what you asked for. If something did not work, such as no music tempo found or no transcript on that footage, it tells you plainly instead of trying again and hoping. Take that at face value.