How to edit an interview video

1. Transcribe it and read it before you cut anything

The slowest way to edit an interview is to scrub through it on a timeline. The fastest is to read it. Get a transcript first: most editing apps make one now, and so do plenty of standalone transcription tools. A typed transcript with timecodes is what you want.

Read the whole thing once without stopping, the way the viewer will hear it. Then read it a second time with a highlighter. Mark three kinds of moments:

• Lines that say the point in one breath. These are your soundbites.
• Lines with feeling in them: a laugh, a pause before a hard answer, a specific memory.
• Lines that set something up or explain it. You may need one or two, never all of them.

2. Find the story on paper first

Before you open the timeline, write the film as a list of quotes. This is called a paper edit, and it is where the real editing happens. Copy your marked lines into a document and put them in an order that tells a story, which is rarely the order they were said in.

A simple shape that works for most company interviews:

1. Hook: the most surprising or human line you have, in the first ten seconds.
2. Context: who this person is and what situation they were in. One or two lines.
3. The turn: what changed, what they tried, what went wrong.
4. The result: what is different now, in their words, as concretely as they said it.
5. The close: a line that lands. Often a short one with a smile or a pause after it.

Write one sentence at the top of the document saying what the viewer should take away. Any quote that doesn't serve that sentence comes out, however good it is. Keep a separate list of the best leftovers: they make good short clips later.

If the video is a customer interview, the result section is the one people remember, so give it the strongest material. There is more on that in turning a customer interview into a testimonial.

3. Pick soundbites that stand on their own

A good soundbite makes sense to someone who hasn't heard the question. If the answer starts with “Yes, so, like I said…”, it depends on what came before. Look a sentence or two later for where the thought starts cleanly.

• Prefer the specific over the general: “we cut the onboarding from three weeks to four days” beats “it made things a lot faster”.
• Prefer the second telling. People often say a thing badly first and well the second time.
• Drop lines that only repeat the interviewer's question back.
• When two takes say the same thing, keep the one with more energy, even if it is slightly less tidy.

You can shorten an answer by joining its beginning to its end, but the result must still mean what the person meant. If a cut changes what they said, put it back.

4. Cut on breaths and pauses, not mid-word

Now build the timeline from the paper edit, quote by quote. Where you cut matters as much as what you cut.

• Cut in the gap after a breath or at the end of a thought, where the voice drops.
• Trim “um”, “uh” and false starts, but not every one. Removing all of them makes a person sound like a machine.
• Leave a beat after an important line. Half a second to a second of silence lets it land.
• Listen with headphones to every cut. A cut that looks clean can still clip the first consonant of a word.

Split edits hide joins well. Let the next answer's sound start a moment before its picture (a J-cut), or let a sentence finish under the next shot (an L-cut). The ear accepts a change more easily when sound and picture don't change at the same moment.

5. Cover jump cuts with B-roll or a second angle

When you cut two pieces of the same shot together, the speaker's head jumps. That is a jump cut. In a vlog it can be a style; in a company interview it usually looks like a mistake. You have three ways to hide it.

• B-roll: put footage of what they are talking about over the cut, and keep their voice running underneath. Show the thing they name: the product, the place, the team at work.
• A second camera: if you shot two angles, switch to the other one at the cut. The jump disappears because the shot changes.
• A punch-in: scale the picture up by around 10 to 20 percent for the second piece. It works once or twice; more often and viewers notice the trick.

Choose B-roll by the words, not by what looks pretty. If the speaker says “the warehouse was chaos”, the shot under it should be the warehouse. Hold each B-roll shot for a few seconds, and come back to the speaker's face for the lines that carry feeling: viewers want to see who is talking when it matters.

6. Add a lower third and captions

The first time a person speaks, put their name and role on screen as a lower third: a small text strap in the bottom part of the frame. Keep it to two lines, show it for about four or five seconds, and only once per person unless the video is long.

Add captions too. Many people watch social video with the sound off, and captions help anyone watching in a second language. Generate them from your transcript, then read every line against the audio: names, product terms and numbers are where automatic captions go wrong.

• Keep caption lines short: one or two lines on screen at a time.
• Break lines where a person would pause, not in the middle of a phrase.
• Make sure captions and the lower third never sit on top of each other.
• Export an SRT file as well. Most platforms take one, and it keeps the captions editable.

7. Get the audio right

People forgive average picture. They don't forgive a voice they can't hear. Do these in order:

1. If you recorded a separate microphone, use it instead of the camera's own sound.
2. Even out the voice so quiet answers and loud answers sit at a similar level.
3. Keep music well under the voice while someone is talking. Raise it in the gaps, lower it before the next line starts.
4. Add short fades at the start and end of every sound clip so cuts don't click.
5. Set the final loudness of the whole film. Around -14 LUFS integrated is a common target for online video, with peaks below about -1 dBTP.

Check the mix on laptop speakers and on a phone, not only on good headphones. That is where most people will hear it.

8. Set the length for where it will be watched

Decide the length before the final pass, because it decides what goes. These are working starting points, not rules from the platforms:

• Social feed clip: 30 to 60 seconds, one idea, the hook in the first line. Vertical or square framing.
• Website or LinkedIn video: 1 to 3 minutes, the full story shape from step 2.
• Internal update or event recap: 2 to 4 minutes, with more context and more people.
• Short documentary: as long as the story holds, with B-roll breathers between long answers.

The best way to get to length is to take out whole ideas, not to trim every answer a little. A film made of shortened answers feels rushed; a film with fewer, complete answers feels confident. The leftovers from your paper edit can become a series of social clips later.

9. Final checklist before you export

• Watch it once from start to finish without stopping. Note where your attention drifts, and cut there.
• Show it to someone who wasn't at the shoot. If they can't say what it was about, the story needs work.
• Check every name, title and number on screen against something written.
• Read every caption line.
• Listen for clicks, clipped words, music too loud under speech.
• Send the speaker the final cut if you promised to. It saves a takedown request later.
• Export the main version, the vertical or square version if you need one, and the SRT.