Updated: September 11, 2026
Four hours of talking, three minutes of story
Interview-driven video is the workhorse of Miami corporate and documentary work: the founder story, the customer case study, the employee culture piece, the nonprofit impact film. The shoot produces hours of people answering questions. The deliverable is three minutes that sounds like a story someone meant to tell. The distance between the two is the interview edit, and it is a different discipline from cutting a commercial or a recap. This guide walks through the method that works: transcribe, select, build a paper edit, assemble, then and only then start cutting picture.
Step one: transcribe everything
Before any footage is opened in the editor, every interview is transcribed with timecode. Automated transcription is good enough for this purpose and fast; a bilingual Miami interview needs a tool that handles English and Spanish in the same file, or two passes. The transcript is the working document for the next two steps. Editors who skip it and scrub through footage looking for "the bit where she talks about the hurricane" spend days doing what a text search does in seconds. Our guide to transcripts and captions covers the tools; the same transcript becomes the caption file at the end.
Step two: selects
Read every transcript and mark the passages that could be in the film. Be generous at this stage: anything clear, specific, emotional or surprising. Mark them in the transcript (highlighting works) and note the timecode. Then, for each interviewee, make a short list of the five or ten strongest selects with a one-line summary of what each one says. At the end of this pass you have, for a typical corporate piece with four interviews, perhaps forty selects totalling twenty minutes, and a sense of what the story is, which is often not the story the brief described.
Two habits that make selects better:
- Look for complete thoughts with a beginning and an end. A sentence that starts mid-idea or trails off is hard to use, however good the middle is.
- Look for specifics. "We grew a lot" is filler. "We went from two trucks to eleven in eighteen months" is a line. The specific, concrete answer is almost always the one that survives.
Step three: the paper edit
The paper edit is the film written as a document before it exists as video. It is a sequence of selects, in order, with the interviewee and timecode for each, and notes for what picture might cover it. Building it is the creative centre of the whole job:
- Decide the shape. Most short interview films work as: a hook (the most arresting line, in the first ten seconds), setup (who, what, where), the problem or the turn, what happened, what it means now, and a closing line that lands. Not every film needs every part.
- Arrange selects into that shape. Interviewees can hand off to each other; a sentence from one can be finished by another if they are talking about the same thing. Do not put words in anyone's mouth by cutting a sentence to reverse its meaning.
- Read it out loud with a stopwatch. A paper edit of a three-minute film should read in about three minutes. If it reads in six, cut now, on paper, where cutting is free.
- Share it. A paper edit is the cheapest point at which a client can say "that is not the story we want to tell". Our guide to running client review rounds recommends a paper edit review before any picture is cut, and it saves whole rounds later.
Step four: the radio cut
Now open the editor. Build the paper edit as a timeline of interview clips only, with no B-roll, no music and no graphics: a radio cut. Listen to it with eyes closed. This is where the story is tested for real: pacing, repetition, whether the hand-offs between speakers make sense, whether a line that read well is delivered badly on camera. Fix the story here. Trim the ums and the false starts (carefully; over-cleaned speech sounds robotic). Get a client sign-off on the radio cut if the project allows it, because every later stage is built on it.
Step five: picture
Only now does the B-roll come in. With the story locked, covering it is a matter of matching picture to words: a specific shot for a specific line, a sequence for a passage, the interviewee on camera for the lines that carry emotion or credibility. The rules that keep an interview film from looking like a slideshow:
- Show the interviewee's face for the lines that matter most and for the first time each person speaks. Cover the rest.
- Cut B-roll on the meaning, not the beat. A shot changes when the idea changes.
- Use the second camera angle (if there is one) to hide the edits in the speech, not as decoration. Our guide to multicam editing covers the mechanics.
- Let a strong line breathe: a beat of silence on a face after it is worth more than the next shot.
Music, graphics, mix, grade
Music goes on after picture, not before, so that the story sets the pace and the music follows it. Lower thirds identify each speaker the first time they appear. The dialogue is cleaned and levelled so that four people recorded in four rooms sound like one film; the process is in our piece on audio post for Miami video. Grading matches the interview setups to each other and to the B-roll. Then the captions are made from the same transcript that started the process.
Where it goes wrong
- Starting in the editor without a transcript: days lost scrubbing.
- Cutting picture before the story is locked: every story change means re-cutting B-roll.
- Keeping a weak line because the shot is pretty. The shot can go elsewhere.
- Letting the client review a cut with temp music and no B-roll and calling it "rough": they will judge the missing parts. Show a radio cut as a radio cut, and say what it is for.
Interview editing with Miami Video Services
Every interview-driven project we cut goes through transcript, selects, paper edit and radio cut before picture, with a client review at the paper edit stage where the schedule allows. It is the method that produces the shortest path from a day of interviews to a film that says something, and it makes revision rounds about the story rather than about which shot goes where. If you have interviews shot and no story yet, send us the footage or the transcripts. More about our post-production work is on the about page, and our other editing guides are on the blog.