Build a repeatable three-pass source review
Use orientation, selection, and verification passes to review long-form footage without repeatedly starting over.
Use orientation, selection, and verification passes to review long-form footage without repeatedly starting over.
One pass is doing too many jobs
When you search, judge, trim, and caption at the same time, every promising sentence interrupts the larger review. You rewind, polish a boundary, reconsider the brief, and lose your place. Long footage begins to feel longer because the task keeps changing.
A three-pass review gives each viewing a single purpose. The first pass maps the source. The second chooses campaign-fit candidates. The third verifies boundaries and risks. The footage stays the same, but the decisions become smaller and easier to repeat.
Pass one: orient
Use the transcript, chapters, speaker changes, and broad topic shifts to understand the source. Do not chase perfect timestamps yet. Mark regions where the campaign subject appears and note stretches that can be skipped because they are clearly unrelated.
The output is a source map: a short list of promising regions with enough description to find them again. This is also the moment to catch technical issues such as missing audio, inaccurate transcript timing, or a source that does not match the campaign.
- Label topics, not individual quotes.
- Note speaker and format changes.
- Flag transcript gaps before relying on search.
Pass two: select
Now apply the campaign filter to the promising regions. Save complete ideas, not just opening lines. Give every candidate a working hook, a start and end range, and a one-sentence reason it belongs in the campaign.
Keep the shortlist wider than the final deliverable, but do not save every acceptable passage. A ranked set of distinct angles is more useful than ten versions of the same point.
FIELD NOTESelection should create options with different strengths, not a pile of near-duplicates.
Pass three: verify
Replay each candidate from outside its proposed boundaries. Confirm that the opening does not depend on a missing sentence and that the ending does not cut off a correction or qualification. Then compare the actual runtime and content against every hard requirement.
Only after verification should a moment move into editing or export. This final pass is deliberately skeptical: its job is to find why a promising clip might fail while there is still time to replace it.
- Confirm source ownership and campaign eligibility.
- Check names, claims, captions, and required visual elements.
- Record remaining uncertainty in the handoff note.
Cutmap finds and explains campaign-fit moments. You choose, edit, and publish every clip.