Final Cut

Reflection

Looking back at this entire post-production journey, it didn’t just test my technical skills but it also tested my patience, discipline, and obsession. I had to re-export the film over and over again. Each time I thought it was “final,” I’d spot another issue, a flicker, an audio pop, a timing glitch, a weird color shift I hadn’t noticed before. It became this endless loop of exporting, watching, catching, going back, fixing, rendering, repeating. Days blurred together. I spent endless nights watching render bars slowly move across the screen all night like they had something personal against me.

job 34

And then came the crashes. DaVinci would freeze right when I was almost done. At one point, all my media files got corrupted, and I had to manually relink and restart whole sections. The folder structure, my color-coded bins, everything had to be rebuilt. The anxiety of possibly losing weeks of work was unreal. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. There was this moment where I just sat staring at my screen, in silence, thinking, “What if it’s all gone?” But it wasn’t. I rebuilt. Slowly.

I also realized just how much of filmmaking is invisible. No one’s going to notice the hours I spent aligning subtitles, or how I EQ’d the TV to sound more electronic. To them, it’s just background sound. Just a sigh. Just a creaking door. They won’t know it took over a hundred hours to make that world feel real. They won’t know how long I sat trying to place the exact weight of Saif sitting on the couch. Or how I layered five different sounds just to make a punch feel like a punch.

But that’s okay. Because I know. I know I didn’t make this for people to notice the work. I made it so that they wouldn't notice it at all. So the illusion holds.

So nothing breaks the story. So it feels real.

That used to bother me, but not anymore. Because for once, I’m proud of the invisible things. The stuff that holds everything else up. The things you don’t clap for but would notice if they were gone.

I’ve grown in ways I didn’t expect. I don’t edit the same way I used to. I don’t see sound or pacing or silence the same way anymore. I’ve learned to be intentional. To care not just about how something looks, but why it feels the way it does.

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The Final Cut

And finally, the last render. No errors. No missing subtitles. No lag. No glitches. Just a timeline that didn’t need changing. A cut I could watch and not reach for the mouse. An honest film. My film.