What to Send Your Wedding Video Editor

The short answer: Send footage organised by source, all audio including the board feed, two or three of your own finished films as style reference, your LUT or reference frames, and a short note listing the moments that matter and the problems you already know about. Do not rename camera files. A disorganised handoff costs an editor four to eight hours before a single creative decision gets made — and you pay for those hours either in money or in turnaround.

Almost everything written about outsourcing wedding editing is about choosing an editor. Almost nothing is written about the twenty minutes that happen after you choose one.

That is a strange gap, because the handoff is the single largest controllable variable in how the first cut comes back. Two filmmakers can send the same wedding to the same editor and get films a week and a quality tier apart, purely on how the drive was packed.

This is what to send, from the side that receives it.

Organise by source, not by your own logic

Footage should be organised into folders by camera and source — Camera A, Camera B, drone, lav audio, board audio — rather than by scene, moment, or your personal system. Editors sync and sort by source first, so a source-based structure lets them start immediately, while a scene-based one has to be unpicked before work can begin.

[Couple_Name_Date]
  01_Camera_A          02_Camera_B         03_Camera_C
  04_Drone             05_Audio_Lav        06_Audio_Board
  07_Music_Licensed    08_References       Brief.txt

The numbering matters more than it looks. Folders sort alphabetically by default, so numbered prefixes hold the order on every operating system and every cloud client. Without them, Audio_Board lands above Camera_A and the structure stops communicating anything.

One rule that surprises people: do not rename your camera files. Original filenames carry the camera, card and clip order, which is how an editor reconstructs what happened when. Renaming them to something human-readable destroys that and creates work rather than saving it.

Send all the audio, including the sources you think are useless

Send every audio source you recorded, including camera scratch audio and the board feed, even if you consider them unusable. Editors regularly build a working mix from a source the filmmaker had written off, because the value of a track depends on what the others are missing at that exact moment.

What each one is for:

• Lav recordings. The vows. Primary source for the ceremony, almost without exception.
• Board or DJ feed. Speeches. Clean, but line-level and roomless.
• Camera scratch audio. Rarely the primary. Always the sync reference, and the best source of room tone for patching dropouts.
• Any backup recorder. The one that saves the film when a lav fails mid-vow.

Deleting a track because it sounded bad on set removes an option the editor may need three hours in. Storage is cheap; a lost vow is not. The reasoning behind how those sources get combined is in our guide to fixing wedding film audio in post.

Reference films beat adjectives, every time

The most useful thing in any handoff is two or three of your own finished films. Adjectives like cinematic, warm, or emotional cannot be executed consistently because they mean different things to different editors — a finished film is a specification that leaves no room for interpretation.

A brief describes preferences.
A reference film documents decisions.

Send your own work rather than someone else’s. A film you admire tells an editor what you like; a film you made tells them how you actually cut — where you enter a scene, how long you hold, when you break away, what you refuse to include. Those are the things that make a film recognisably yours.

If you can add one line of commentary per reference, it doubles in value. Something as simple as “this is the pacing I want, but the grade is too warm” resolves ambiguity that would otherwise take a revision round to surface.

The note that saves a revision round

A handoff note should be short and specific — under 300 words is usually enough. It needs three things: the moments that must appear, the problems you already know about, and anything about the couple an editor could not infer from the footage.

Moments that must appear

Not a shot list. Five or six things, with rough timecodes if you have them. The father’s face during the vows. The speech that broke the room. The thing that happened at 11pm that nobody expected. An editor watching eight hours of footage cold will find most of these, but not all, and not the one that mattered to the couple for reasons invisible on camera.

Problems you already know about

This is the section filmmakers skip and editors value most. The card that dropped frames. The twenty minutes Camera B spent repositioning. The lav that went to static during the ring exchange. Every one of these gets discovered eventually — the only question is whether it costs the editor twenty minutes or three hours.

Context the footage does not carry

Which guest is the couple’s late father’s brother. That the ceremony was in two languages and both matter. That the dog in three shots belonged to the bride’s grandmother. None of this is visible, all of it changes edit decisions.

How to actually transfer it

Use a persistent cloud service such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or Frame.io for raw wedding footage rather than a link-expiry service. WeTransfer links expire, and editors routinely need to re-download a folder days into a project, at which point an expired link costs a full re-upload from your side.

• Persistent cloud storage for the footage itself. Set the folder to not expire and confirm the editor’s access before you stop paying attention to it.
• A physical drive is still fastest for very large multi-camera weddings. Format exFAT — NTFS is awkward on macOS and FAT32 caps single files at 4 GB, which a single ceremony clip will exceed.
• Never send proxies only. If the grade matters, the editor needs the original codec. Proxies are for offline speed, not for finishing.

Whatever you use, upload once and keep it live until the film is signed off. The most common avoidable delay in outsourced editing is not the edit — it is a second transfer.

The four things that actually cost you a week

In order of how much time they waste, from the receiving end:

• Footage in one undifferentiated folder. Four to eight hours of sorting before any creative decision. This is the single largest avoidable cost in the whole process.
• Missing audio. A round trip to ask, then wait, then re-download — typically two to four days of calendar for ten minutes of work.
• No reference film. The first cut is a guess. It will be competent and it will not be yours, and correcting that takes a full revision round.
• Undisclosed problems. The editor finds them at the worst moment, usually after building a sequence around footage that turns out to be unusable.

None of these are editing problems. All of them are packing problems, and all of them are free to avoid.

A handoff checklist

FOOTAGE
  [ ] folders numbered by source, not by scene
  [ ] original camera filenames intact
  [ ] proxies clearly separated from originals

AUDIO
  [ ] every lav recording
  [ ] board / DJ feed
  [ ] camera scratch audio
  [ ] backup recorder files

REFERENCE
  [ ] 2-3 of your own finished films
  [ ] one line of commentary on each
  [ ] LUT or reference frames if you have a set look
  [ ] licensed music, or a named track direction

NOTE (under 300 words)
  [ ] 5-6 moments that must appear
  [ ] problems you already know about
  [ ] context the footage does not carry
  [ ] deliverables and lengths
  [ ] delivery date you actually need

Twenty minutes of packing. It is the highest-return twenty minutes in the entire outsourcing relationship, and it is the reason two filmmakers using the same editor get different films.

If you are still deciding whether to outsource at all, that is a separate question — covered in how to outsource wedding video editing without losing your style and in the complete guide to wedding video editing. And if you want to document your style before you brief anyone, the Style Match is the self-audit we use to start every partnership.

Sending footage to an editor: common questions

What should I send my wedding video editor?

Footage organised in numbered folders by source, every audio track including the board feed and camera scratch, two or three of your own finished films as reference, your LUT or reference frames, and a short note covering key moments, known problems, and deliverables. Keep original camera filenames intact.

Should I rename my camera files before sending them?

No. Original camera filenames carry the camera, card and clip sequence, which is how an editor reconstructs the order of the day. Renaming them removes that information and creates additional work rather than saving any.

How should I organise wedding footage for an editor?

By source rather than by scene — separate numbered folders for each camera, drone, lav audio and board audio. Editors sync and sort by source first, so a source-based structure lets work start immediately. Scene-based organisation has to be unpicked before editing can begin.

What is the best way to send wedding footage to an editor?

Persistent cloud storage such as Google Drive, Dropbox or Frame.io, with the folder set not to expire. Avoid link-expiry services like WeTransfer for raw footage, since editors frequently need to re-download days into a project. For very large multi-camera weddings a physical drive formatted exFAT is often faster.

Do I need to send a LUT to my editor?

Send it if you have a set look, but reference frames from your finished films are more useful. A LUT tells an editor what transform you apply; a graded frame tells them what result you actually want, which is the thing they are matching to.

How long should a brief for a wedding video editor be?

Under 300 words. Longer briefs tend to describe preferences in adjectives, which cannot be executed consistently. A short note listing specific moments, known footage problems, deliverables and the real delivery date is worth more than several pages of tonal description.