Six Edit Suite Mistakes That Cost News Teams Time on Transmission Day

The most common mistake I see in edit suites is opening the footage before anyone has written down what the item is about. Editors scroll through rushes, fall for a striking shot and build the piece around it. Twenty minutes later the story has no spine, and the reporter is rewriting the script to fit pictures that were never the point.

A better habit is a two-line brief agreed before the first cut: what has happened, and what the viewer should understand at the end. Everything else is measured against those lines. A beautiful shot that does not serve them goes in the bin, however much effort the camera operator put into it.

This matters most on urgent stories, where the temptation to start cutting straight away feels like speed. In practice, five minutes of agreement saves the long back-and-forth of revisions that follow when producer and editor hold different pictures of the finished item in their heads.

• Write the story in two lines before touching the timeline
• Agree the running time with the producer first
• Mark the essential interview line before cutting around it

Files named with a camera number and a string of digits seem fine at the time. Then a second editor picks up the project for the late bulletin and spends a quarter of an hour working out which clip is the councillor and which is the road closure. On a tight schedule that quarter of an hour is the whole margin.

Name clips and bins by subject and location as they come in, and keep one folder structure for every job. Check each file plays through, with sound, before the shooter leaves. A corrupted card discovered after the crew has gone home is a very different problem from one found at the kerbside.

Handover notes belong here too. A short text file listing what was shot, what is usable and what is missing lets a colleague continue the work without ringing the person who has already gone off shift.

• Use one naming pattern for every job
• Verify every file before the crew packs up
• Leave a short handover note with the project

Viewers forgive soft pictures far sooner than muddy speech. Yet audio is often the last thing checked in the suite, and the first thing a transmission engineer flags. Levels that sit comfortably in headphones can fall outside the loudness range a broadcaster expects, and an item can be bounced back for that alone.

Build in a listening pass of its own, separate from the picture edit, ideally on speakers as well as headphones. Listen for background hum that changes between cuts, a door slam under an interview, or a sudden jump in level where two clips meet. These are small faults that make a sound mix feel careless.

Where the original recording is poor, say so early. A producer who knows the interview was captured in a windy car park can decide to use fewer words from it, rather than discovering the problem at the final check.

• Do a dedicated audio pass after the picture lock
• Check loudness against the broadcaster's specification
• Flag poor recordings to the producer early

Captioning is where time disappears. A two-minute item with several speakers can take far longer to caption than anyone expects, and spelling mistakes in names or place names are the errors viewers notice most. Leaving it until the picture is locked and the clock is running is a reliable way to introduce them.

Collect spellings as the story develops: names, titles, constituency and street names, confirmed by the reporter rather than guessed from a phone call. Keep them in one list that the editor and the person typing the captions both use.

Lower-third graphics follow the same rule. Check that they stay clear of the safe area, that the text is readable at a glance and that each name matches the caption file. A mismatch between the two looks sloppy and is easily avoided with a single source of truth.

• Confirm every name spelling with the reporter
• Keep one shared list for captions and graphics
• Check text sits inside the safe area

Exporting a good edit in the wrong format is a frustrating way to lose a slot. Frame rate, resolution, codec, audio channel layout, head and tail requirements and slate details all vary between destinations, and a file that plays perfectly on the editor's laptop may not ingest at all on the other end.

Keep a written delivery specification for each destination and tick it off before sending. Export a short test section first if the destination is new, and watch the finished file from start to finish rather than trusting the progress bar.

The same discipline applies to versions. A long cut for the evening programme and a short one for the bulletin should be clearly labelled, so the wrong one is never sent in a hurry. A filename that says which is which costs seconds and removes the risk.

• Keep a delivery spec per destination
• Watch the exported file in full before sending
• Label long and short versions clearly

Editors who have looked at the same footage for an hour stop seeing it. A flash frame, a wrong caption, a jump cut in the middle of a sentence: these slip through because the person who made them cannot see them any more. The fix is simple and rarely used, which is a second pair of eyes.

Even a five-minute review by a producer or a colleague who has not worked on the item will catch things the editor cannot. If nobody is free, step away for ten minutes and watch it again as a viewer, in one pass, without stopping.

Agree beforehand what the reviewer is looking for. Accuracy of facts and names first, then sound, then picture. A reviewer given a clear list is faster and more useful than one asked simply to take a look.

• Get a second person to watch the final cut
• Review facts and names before style
• Take a ten-minute break before the last viewing