What is a stringout?

Every keeper moment, laid end to end: the timeline where footage stops being a pile and starts being material.

How is a stringout different from an assembly?

Intent. A stringout has no story ambitions: its job is inventory. The moments are usually ordered by source, by chronology, or by topic — every bite about the flood, every shot of the harbor — so the editor can survey what actually exists. An assembly (or first assembly) is the next move: the same material rearranged into narrative order, a deliberate first guess at the film's shape. Put simply, a stringout answers "what do I have?" while an assembly answers "what might this become?"

The distinction matters in practice because a stringout is allowed to be boring, repetitive, and long. Editors who try to make their stringouts "watchable" are doing the assembly's job early and the inventory's job badly. Redundancy is the point — you want the three competing versions of the same anecdote sitting side by side, because that is how you pick the best one.

How do editors build a stringout?

In outline, five moves — the step-by-step guide walks the same method with the exact mechanics in Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve.

1. Screen and mark selects. Go through dailies or interview transcripts and flag anything with potential — generous on the first pass, since a stringout exists to be culled later.
2. Group by something useful. Per interviewee, per scene, per theme, per shoot day. On interview-heavy projects, many editors keep one stringout per character plus one per major topic.
3. Lay the marked ranges into a fresh timeline, end to end. No transitions, no music, no trimming beyond loose handles. Some editors drop a marker or a text slate between sources.
4. Watch it down and rate. A second pass demotes the weak material — many editors promote survivors into a shorter "selects of selects" reel until only the strongest minutes remain.
5. Pull from it forever. The stringout stays alive through the whole edit as the shopping shelf you return to whenever the rough cut needs a stronger beat.

How long should a stringout run compared to the final cut?

Much longer — and that's healthy. A common working ratio on documentaries is three to ten times the target runtime at the first pass, so a 90-minute feature might begin life as many hours of stringouts split across several reels. If your stringout is barely longer than the finished piece, you probably marked too conservatively and will discover holes late, when reshoots are expensive or impossible. The culling passes are where the ratio comes down; the first lay-in is where you keep your options open.

The habit predates digital editing. In the film era, assistants spliced circled takes into "select rolls" on the KEM or Steenbeck so a cutter could screen candidates quickly — the modern selects sequence keeps the same logic with cheaper scissors. On multi-camera interview shoots, stringouts are typically built from synced groups (see multicam and sync clips) so every angle rides along with each chosen moment.

Common questions