Transcript-based editing: cutting interviews from the page, not the timeline

A practical guide to transcribing interviews for documentary post: when AI is good enough, when human review is needed, how to handle speakers, timecode, and overlap.

A paper cut is a written assembly of interview selects in the order the editor plans to use them. It is the blueprint for the rough cut. Here is how it works.

An honest comparison of the four speech-to-text providers most documentary editors actually use, scored on accent handling, diarization, latency, and cost per hour of audio.