Twenty hours, ninety seconds.

Ask any senior editor what the worst part of the job is, and they will not say the cuts. They will say the lookups. The hours of scrubbing across rushes that precede the ninety seconds anyone ever sees.

The work an editor does between getting the brief and starting the timeline is mostly memory and patience. Find every moment where the speaker mentioned the new product. Find every reaction to the question about timeline. Find every angle of the same scene from three cameras. Then, finally, cut.

When that lookup work happens against a queryable index, something changes about what the timeline gets to be. The rough cut starts before the editor opens their NLE.

The interesting part of editing was never the lookup. It was the choosing.

That is the part of the work we are trying to give back. Not the choosing — that is craft, and we have no business near it. The lookup. The tedium that precedes the craft. Hand that to the index, and let the editor stay in the part where they actually decide what the audience sees.