The DNW Cut

Read this once end to end. After that, keep it open on your second monitor and work section by section.

Watch these first

Nothing in this guide replaces watching the references. Watch all four before you touch a timeline, and watch the highlight twice — once for structure, once with the sound up for how the music and speeches sit together.

01The two deliverables

Two films per wedding. They are not the same film at two lengths — they do different jobs and they're built differently.

02Ten things that make a film work

If you only remember ten things, remember these. They're principles, not rules — but they're the ones I'd defend hardest, and everything else in this guide is detail underneath them.

1. Experiment freely with transitions and effects. There's no approved list and no cap — if it makes the film better, use it. The only test is whether it's serving the moment or covering for a weak cut.
2. Pick the music first, then cut to it. Never cut a sequence and hunt for a track afterwards. Mark the beats, then build.
3. Energy has to move. Flat is the only real failure. Every film rises, drops, and rises higher. Never one speed the whole way through.
4. Speech beats spectacle. When a vow or a speech line is landing, hold the shot. Don't cut away from the emotional peak to show off a drone move.
5. Never let the audio go silent. Natural sound sits under everything, always — room tone, birds, crowd, footsteps. Silence under music reads as an unfinished edit.
6. Blacks never hit zero. Bright, colourful, airy. Lift the shadows. Crushed blacks kill the whole look.
7. Every shot has to match its neighbours. One shot that's cooler or darker than the one before it is more noticeable than any missing moment.
8. Slow motion is a tool, not a texture. Only on footage actually shot at high frame rate, and only when the moment deserves it.
9. Cut faces, not scenery. B-roll is the connective tissue between people. If a stretch has no human in it for more than about six seconds, it's too long.
10. Watch your cut with fresh eyes before sending. Full screen, headphones on, start to finish, no scrubbing. Then run the QC list in section 12.

The few things that aren't suggestions

Everything creative is yours. These six aren't creative — they're the things that break the workflow or the client relationship if they slip, so they're the short list I actually need every time.

• Every word of every vow and speech is audible. If a critical line is unusable, tell me — don't bury it and hope.
• Colour is consistent shot to shot and camera to camera, in the bright and airy direction of section 09
• Filenames follow the convention in section 03, with the right version number
• Export specs match section 10, and trailers ship with both the horizontal and vertical cut
• Deadlines in section 10 are met, or you tell me the day you realise you'll miss one
• Nothing goes out without the QC pass in section 12

03Project setup & naming

You can cut in Premiere Pro or Resolve — whichever you're faster in. The setup and the naming are identical either way, and they're not optional. Every file you send me has to be findable in three years.

Sequence & timeline settings

Folder structure

Build this on the drive before you import anything. Same shape on every job.

File naming

One pattern, everywhere. Date is the wedding date, not today's date.

YYYY-MM-DD_Partner1-Partner2_Deliverable_vNN

04The trailer

Ninety seconds, one arc. Hook hard, build, drop into one honest emotional beat, then climb higher than you were before and get out.

Beat sheet

05The highlight film

Five to eight minutes. It opens like a trailer, then becomes a film. The mistake to avoid is holding trailer energy past the first minute — you exhaust the viewer and there's nowhere left to go.

This is the hardest thing we make, so this section is the longest. Build it in the order below and it gets a lot easier — most of the pain in a highlight film comes from editors cutting pictures before they know what the film is saying.

Build it in this order

Ten passes. Don't skip ahead and don't jump between acts — each pass makes the next one faster. The hours are a guide for a full 8-minute film.

Choosing the speech that carries it

The spine is the film. Get this right and everything else is decoration.

• Short beats long. A 12-second vow line that lands is worth more than 45 seconds of context. Cut speeches to their best sentence, then their best clause.
• Look for lines that pay each other off. If she says "I knew the second I saw him" in her vows and his best man opens with "he called me that night and said he'd met her" — that's your opening and your closing, and the film writes itself between them.
• Use laughter. A film that's only tears is exhausting. The speeches section is where the room laughs, and that laugh is what makes the next emotional beat land.
• You can cut inside a sentence. Remove ums, restarts and rambles. Nobody notices; everybody notices when you don't.
• Save your single best line for the very end. Don't spend it in the cold open.

The shape

Act breakdown

06Cutting craft

Shot length by section

Keep this table next to you. If a section feels wrong, measure it before you re-cut it — the problem is almost always that the shot lengths drifted.

Transitions & effects

You have full creative freedom here. There's no approved list, no banned list and no cap. If a transition, an effect or a technique makes the film better, use it — and if you find something new that works, show me and it goes in the next version of this guide.

Two things only. First, do transitions in the rhythm pass, once the cut already works as straight cuts — decorate a structure, don't use effects to hold a weak edit together. Second, make it land on the music. A transition that isn't on a beat reads as an accident no matter how good it looks.

Slow motion & speed

Slow motion works best on footage actually shot at a high frame rate. Use the table below when you have it.

Slowing 24p when there's no other option

Sometimes the only take of a moment is at 24p, and the moment is worth having in slow motion anyway. That's fine — do it, but do it carefully.

• Stay between 50% and 75%. Below 50% it falls apart and you'll see it.
• Optical Flow (Premiere) or Speed Warp (Resolve), then check the shot frame by frame. Warping shows up first around hands, fingers, hair edges and anything crossing in front of a face.
• If it warps, drop to Frame Blending — softer, but a soft shot beats a melting one.
• It works best on slow, simple motion: a held look, a hand moving, someone turning. It falls apart on fast motion and busy backgrounds.
• Keep these short — a second or two — and don't put two of them next to each other.
• Flag it in your delivery note so I know it was a choice, not an accident.

General

• Set interpretation to Optical Flow (Premiere) or Optical Flow / Speed Warp (Resolve) — but check every ramped shot frame by frame for warping around hands and hair. If it warps, use Frame Blending instead.
• Speed ramps get eased in and out. A linear ramp looks like a mistake.
• Slow motion belongs in: the trailer's breathe section, portraits, the first dance, reactions during vows, sparkler exits. It does not belong in the morning prep or over speeches.
• Never slow a shot where someone is speaking on camera.

B-roll discipline

• B-roll connects people — it isn't a place to park pretty shots. Every b-roll run should be answering a question the previous shot asked.
• No more than three consecutive shots without a person in frame.
• Drone shots: two per film maximum, and never more than four seconds each. They establish; they don't carry.
• Detail shots (rings, shoes, invitations) live in the morning act. Sprinkling them through the ceremony kills momentum.

07Music

The track is the skeleton. Choose it before you build anything, mark the beats, then cut. Working the other way round is why edits feel flat.

Use whatever you want

No restrictions on music. Commercial tracks, chart music, anything you like — pick the song that makes the film work and don't think about licensing. That's handled on my end.

If you'd rather work from a library, we have an Epidemic Sound subscription available to you — ask me and I'll get you access. Either way, drop the track files into 03_MUSIC so I can find them later.

Choosing tracks

• Trailer: one track, ideally with a natural build-drop-build shape. Two only if you need a genuine tonal switch at the breathe section.
• Highlight: three to five tracks. Roughly: one for the cold open, one for the morning and ceremony, one for portraits and speeches, one for the party, and often a stripped-back reprise for the resolution.
• Instrumental or low-lyric tracks work better under speech — competing words fight each other. Save the big vocal tracks for the cold open and the party, where they can be the loudest thing.
• Bringing a track back at the end works. Reprising the cold-open track quietly under the resolution ties the film together — use it when it fits.

Track transitions

• Never crossfade two tracks over each other for more than a second — it sounds like a mistake.
• Best method: end track A on a natural resolution or a hard stop, leave a half-second gap with only natural sound, start track B.
• Or cut track A out on a hard visual cut and start track B on the same frame. Clean and intentional.
• Every track change should land on a scene change, never mid-scene.

08The audio mix

Half of the emotion is in the sound. A well-graded film with a lazy mix still feels amateur, and viewers won't be able to tell you why.

Levels

How to duck properly

• Use keyframed volume, not an auto-ducking plugin. Auto-duck pumps and it's audible.
• 300 ms fade down, 500 ms fade up. Start the fade down about half a second before the person speaks, not on their first word.
• Never mute the music completely under speech. It should drop away, not disappear.

Cleaning up speech

• High-pass filter at 80–100 Hz on every speech clip — kills rumble, wind and handling noise.
• Gentle de-noise only. Over-processed audio sounds underwater and is worse than a bit of hiss.
• Light compression: ratio around 3:1, a few dB of gain reduction, so quiet lines stay audible.
• Small presence lift around 3–5 kHz for clarity if a lav sounds dull.
• If you have both a lav and a recorder feed, sync them and use whichever is cleaner per line — you can switch mid-speech.

09The look

Bright, colourful, airy — and identical across every shot and every camera. Consistency matters more than any individual creative choice in here.

The five things that define the look

Grading order — do it in this sequence

Whether you're in Lumetri or Resolve's node graph, the order is the same. Doing it out of order is why grades stop matching.

Skin tones — the part that matters most

We shoot couples and families across a wide range of skin tones, often in the same frame. Getting this right is the single biggest difference between a good grade and a great one.

• Use the vectorscope skin tone line on every setup. All skin, from the lightest to the deepest, sits along that same line. If someone's skin drifts off it toward green or magenta, correct the hue before you touch anything else.
• Adjust luminance, not hue, for different skin tones. A lighter face might sit around 60–70 IRE and a deeper face around 45–60 IRE — both correctly exposed, both on the same hue line.
• Never desaturate deeper skin tones. The instinct to pull saturation down when a face reads "too warm" makes deep skin look grey and lifeless. Fix it with luminance and a small hue nudge instead.
• Protect shadow detail on deeper skin. This is exactly why we lift blacks — crushed shadows swallow facial detail. Check faces in the darkest shots specifically.
• Watch for green and cyan contamination in open shade and under tree cover. It reads on every skin tone but it's most damaging on deeper ones. The magenta tint bias in our look is there to counter it.
• When two people with very different skin tones share a frame, grade for both — use a window or a qualifier if you need to lift one without blowing the other out.

Matching cameras

• Pick the A-cam as the reference and bring every other camera to it. Never meet in the middle.
• Grade one shot per lighting setup properly, then copy that grade across the setup and trim individually.
• Drone and gimbal footage almost always needs extra saturation to match — check it against a ground shot side by side, not on its own.
• The test: scrub through the sequence at 4× speed. Any shot that flickers brighter, darker, cooler or warmer than its neighbours is not matched yet.

10Export & delivery

Review copies (what you send me for notes)

1080p keeps uploads fast and it's plenty for giving notes. Don't send 4K for review.

Approved masters

4K or 1080p are both fine — match whatever the footage supports. If the wedding was shot mostly in 1080p, don't upscale it.

The vertical trailer

Every trailer ships in both 16:9 and 9:16. The vertical version is a real reframe, not a letterbox or a centre crop.

• Duplicate the finished 16:9 sequence, change the sequence to 1080 × 1920, and reposition every shot so the subject stays in frame.
• Faces and the couple stay in the upper-middle third — the bottom of a vertical frame gets covered by captions and UI on most platforms.
• Scale up where you have to. Shot in 4K, you have plenty of room to punch in for a 1080-wide vertical frame without losing quality.
• Wide establishing shots and drone shots rarely survive the crop. Swap them for tighter alternatives rather than cropping into something unreadable.
• Keep the same edit and the same music. Only the framing changes.
• Name it ..._Trailer_Vertical_v01.

Turnaround targets

If you're going to miss one of these, tell me on the day you realise it — not on the deadline.

11Review workflow

Your side is simple: cut it, export it, upload it to me. I handle the rest on the back end.

I run reviews through Frame.io, so that's where your corrections will come from — every note timestamped on the exact frame, with a link you can open and work straight from. You don't need an account set up or anything on your end beyond opening the link I send.

12QC before you send

Watch it full screen, on headphones, start to finish, without scrubbing. Then work through this. Every version, every time.

Structure

• Length is inside the target range for this deliverable
• The energy curve is right — it rises, drops, and finishes higher than the earlier peak
• Cold open ends on a hard stop, not a fade (highlight only)
• No stretch longer than 6 seconds without a person in frame
• Name card correct: names spelled right, date correct

Picture

• Scrubbed at 4× — no shot flickers brighter, darker, cooler or warmer than its neighbours
• No crushed blacks anywhere; shadows sit at 4–6 IRE
• No clipped highlights; dresses hold texture
• Every face sits on the vectorscope skin tone line
• Deeper skin tones hold detail in shadow and haven't been desaturated
• Slow-motion shots checked frame by frame for optical-flow warping
• Any slowed 24p footage stayed at 50–75% and holds up frame by frame
• Every transition and effect lands on a beat
• No unintentional black frames or single-frame gaps on the timeline

Sound

• Every word of every vow and speech is clearly intelligible
• Natural sound present under every shot — no silent gaps
• Music ducks smoothly under speech, never cuts out hard
• Track changes land on scene changes, not mid-scene
• Master at −14 LUFS, true peak no higher than −1 dBTP
• No clipping, no pops at cut points

Delivery

• Filename follows the convention exactly, with the right version number
• Export spec matches section 10
• Trailers only: vertical 9:16 cut done and reframed shot by shot
• Uploaded to the correct shared folder
• Delivery note written: what you're unsure about, what you couldn't fix

13Instant rejections

These come straight back without a full review. Not to be difficult — each one costs a whole round trip, and they're all avoidable in the last ten minutes of your edit.

Questions

If something here conflicts with what a specific wedding needs, ask before you cut — not after. And if a rule in this guide is making a film worse, tell me. This is version 1 and it should keep getting better.