Interview & Dialogue Editing

Here is what we have to work with. Interview and dialogue edits in Colombia draws on two intersecting traditions: DOCMA Bogotá's documentary post infrastructure. This has shaped much of the country's non-fiction output across the last two decades. The prestige feature-editing lineage of José Bejarano (Litigante, Monos) and Etienne Boussac (Birds of Passage), whose work shows how interview material can carry observational weight in hybrid forms.

Here is the short of it. Our editors work primarily in Avid Media Composer for dialogue and interview cuts — the standard inherited from the Caracol and RCN telenovela editing factories whose graduates populate much of the freelance market — with DaVinci Resolve Studio and Adobe Premiere Pro as secondary sites for projects whose finishing pipeline lives elsewhere. Dialogue selects are pulled from multi-channel field-recorded WAVs (Sound Devices 833 or 888 mixers from the on-set sound team), with timecode-synced transcripts driving the first pass.

Here is the breakdown. Bilingual EN/ES workflows are the norm rather than the exception. Colombian documentary and series projects routinely shoot interviews in neutral Spanish, regional Spanish (paisa from Medellín, costeño from the Caribbean coast, valluno from Cali, the distinct cadences of Bogotá and Pasto), and English where the project has global subjects or anglophone narrators. Our editors work bilingually on the cut, with reference-language switching in the timeline and per-language subtitle previews loaded onto the avid for review screenings.

Here is what that looks like on the ground. Birds of Passage's interview-doc hybrid technique — where Rodrigo Guerrero's edit way interleaves Wayuu testimony with observational drama footage — is a reference for projects working with indigenous-language material. We set up with Wayuu, Embera, and other indigenous-language consultants where the content needs it. Output handoff to online conform ships as Avid AAF with embedded effects and audio routing, with EDL and XML variants ready for cross-sites finishing.