How to Edit Interview Videos

1. Pacing a conversation

Interviews need a gentler hand than solo content. The pauses in a conversation are doing work — a guest thinking before answering reads as consideration, and removing that makes a thoughtful person sound glib. Cut the stumbles, the false starts and the dead air between turns, but leave the beats that carry meaning. A gentle pacing pass is almost always the right setting here.

• Cut: hesitations, restarts, the gap while the interviewer decides what to ask next.
• Keep: the pause before a considered answer, the beat after a difficult question.
• Tighten the handoffs between turns, which is where most of the dead air lives.

2. Cutting questions and crosstalk

Long questions are the most common thing worth cutting in an interview. If a question took forty seconds to ask and the answer stands alone, shorten or remove it. Crosstalk — both people speaking at once — is harder, because cutting it can make the conversation feel less natural. The rule of thumb is to keep short overlaps, which read as engagement, and cut long ones, which read as chaos.

• Shorten rambling questions to the version you wish you had asked.
• Cut interviewer acknowledgements that interrupt an answer.
• Keep brief overlaps; remove sustained talking over each other.
• If an answer works without the question, lose the question entirely.

3. Reactions and cutaways

The reason interviews traditionally use multiple cameras is that a reaction shot is the most graceful way to hide a cut. If you have a second angle, cutting to the listener while the speaker continues covers any edit in the dialogue seamlessly. If you do not, a cutaway to whatever is being discussed does the same job, and a small scale change across the cut is the minimum version.

• A reaction shot covers dialogue cuts invisibly.
• A cutaway to the subject of the conversation does the same and adds information.
• With a single locked-off camera, alternate scale slightly across cuts.
• Let the audio run continuously across the visual cut so the conversation never breaks.

4. Balancing two voices

Two people rarely record at the same level, and the difference is more noticeable in an edit than it was in the room. Set each speaker's level so the viewer never has to adjust their volume across a turn, and check it at the handoffs specifically, since that is where a mismatch is most audible. If one microphone picked up noticeably more room noise, keeping the levels closer together helps disguise it.

5. Restructuring the conversation

The order a conversation happened in is not sacred. Interviews often find their best material late, once the guest has relaxed, and the strongest answer frequently belongs near the front. Moving a section is a straightforward timeline operation, and as long as the result does not misrepresent what was said, reordering usually produces a much better watch than a chronological cut.

• Lead with the strongest answer, not the first one.
• Group answers on the same topic even if they were scattered.
• End on something that resolves rather than on whatever came last.
• Never reorder in a way that changes the meaning of an answer.