How Sergio Miranda Strings Out His Doc Edits

"It strings out media from a shoot so an editor can have access to the material quickly." — Sergio Miranda, founder, Serril Media

Twenty years of owning the post workflow

Sergio Miranda has spent about two decades in TV, film, branded, and documentary work. He founded Serril Media to provide post-production services, the kind that carry a project the whole way: overseeing the post workflow from DIT through final delivery and distribution, for productions that range from studio work with Netflix and HBO down to independent documentaries.

That breadth is the point. The same person who can set up a workflow for a studio doc is the one who has to get an indie project, with years of footage and no studio budget, all the way to a finished cut.

"I oversee the post workflow from DIT to final delivery and distribution."

Eight years of footage, forty interviews, and a wall of media

The project that pushed him to try Eddie was a passion project, and it had the scale to match: more than eight years of filming and over forty interviews. The hard part was not the cutting. It was everything that had to happen before the cutting could start, the sheer analysis of that much material.

So he reached for Eddie, along with other AI tools, in exactly the place the volume hurt most: the moments where they needed to analyze a lot of media at once.

"It really helped in the moments where we needed to analyze a lot of media."

Eddie as the assistant editor

Sergio started by testing how far Eddie could take a rough cut, to see whether it could produce an edit he would actually be happy with. What stuck was not the finished edit. It was the front of the process. He found Eddie was strong at organizing and stringing out the media from a shoot, so an editor could get to the material quickly instead of digging for it.

In practice, that means he can hand Eddie a script or the timecodes from his transcript, and it will string the selects out for him directly in his NLE. For interview-driven work, that is the grind, handled.

The part he singles out as a real shift is multicam. Eddie can edit with multicam, not just master clips, in Premiere Pro, which he calls huge for unscripted, scripted, and doc projects cut in Premiere. It also reshapes the handoff: a producer can use Eddie to string out scenes and selects and pass them to an editor with no relink issues.

"I can give Eddie a script or timecodes from my transcript and it will string it out in my NLE."

What Eddie doesn't do, and that's the point

Sergio is candid about the ceiling, and it is the most useful part of his account. Eddie is excellent at going through tons of media. Where it falls short is the creative brief, the human read on what the story is actually about.

His example is specific. He used Eddie on an edit about an LA conservationist talking about how bats live in Los Angeles and gather around stadiums like Dodger Stadium and USC. Eddie missed that thread completely, and missed anything tied to LA, because nothing told it what mattered.

"There should be a creative brief mode. You feed Eddie the info, the ideas, and the goals for the edit you want, and it gives the tool a story compass to find the best moments that match the brief."

That is the line between help and authorship, drawn from the inside. The tool can organize the footage. Knowing which moment carries the story is still the editor's job.

The result

For a project measured in years of footage and dozens of interviews, the wall of media stopped being the obstacle it used to be. Eddie organized and strung out the material, multicam included, so the edit could start from selects instead of from scratch, and a producer could hand an editor a clean stringout with no relink headache. His advice to other editors and producers fits a tool this new.

"Play with it and treat it as a tool. It's new to the market, so there are no rules yet on how to use it."

Try Eddie on your next documentary cut →

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