How to review your candidate moments as one playable strip
Ask Vizard Agent to join every shortlisted moment into a single strip and upload it before any editing starts. You watch the candidates back to back with their sound and their transcript, and cut the shortlist on how each one is actually delivered, which is something no contact sheet of still frames can ever tell you.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Ask Vizard Agent for the strip explicitly. Otherwise a review pass tends to arrive as a sheet of still frames, which is right for judging framing and wrong for judging whether a line is funny. Leave a little handle on each side, because the delivery lives in the second before and the second after.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
What makes a line work is the pause before it and the way it's said, so a list of timecodes tells you nothing. The strip goes together early, long before any styling, and nothing gets styled, timed or scored until a moment survives a watch-through. In the session behind this article it:
- Built a catalogue of a whole podcast back catalogue, searched the transcripts for candidate moments and read the exact wording and timings of the shortlist.
- Downloaded each candidate as a segment and checked the segment lengths were what it had asked for.
- Assembled the candidates into one review strip and uploaded it so it could be watched properly.
- Transcribed and watched the strip end to end, in order and with sound, then read its own transcript back.
- Cut the shortlist from forty candidates to a running order of nine, and only then laid out the clip list and timings.
When does this not work well?
A strip is for judging performance. It's the wrong tool for picture quality, continuity or framing, and it can mislead about pace, because forty moments back to back feel faster than they will in a finished cut. Silent footage needs a contact sheet instead, and hundreds of candidates need narrowing by text first.
Common questions
Why not use a contact sheet? Because stills cannot tell you whether a line is delivered well. Vizard Agent uses both, for different jobs.
Can I share it? Yes. Vizard Agent uploads it, so it is one link.
Will it cut the shortlist itself? Vizard Agent will recommend. The choice stays yours.