Stringout, selects, assembly, radio cut — what each actually means

StoryFolder —

Part of: How to show a producer or client your selects when they don't have the NLE open

Last updated: 2 September 2026.

A producer asks for "a stringout by Friday". You build one: every usable take from the shoot, in shooting order, nothing trimmed. Friday comes and it turns out they meant the interview bites only, cut down, with no b-roll on top. Somebody else on the same job calls that a radio cut, and the vendor page you looked at last night calls the whole thing an assembly.

None of you is wrong. These terms describe real, distinct working artefacts, and their names are not standardised across genres, shops or countries. Each has a sourced definition below, and each has a point where practitioners openly disagree. The move when the words collide is to establish four things: what footage goes in, what rule orders it, how tightly it is trimmed, and who sees it next.

What is a stringout?

A working sequence that puts a broad selection of footage in one place so the team can see what it has. It can be everything usable from a shoot, one day's material, or dialogue bites only. The word names the stage of post you are at, and it tells you very little about what will be in the file.

Frame.io's Workflow Guide gives the umbrella definition: a stringout is "any time in the post process where you put together a large selection of footage in order to see it all at once and know what your options are". Their metaphor is the one that sticks: the only time you see everything in a wardrobe is on laundry day, when it is all hung on the line one item at a time with space between.

That guide names five variants, all of them stringouts: narrative, dialogue, documentary, VFX and alts. Which is already a warning that the word covers a family rather than one deliverable.

Practitioners narrow it much further, and they narrow it differently from each other. On a 2012 Creative COW thread about stringouts, several working editors gave definitions that do not line up. Shane Ross described his:

"sound bites strung out back to back, with no footage covering it, no music, no pacing… Also called a RADIO CUT."

Set that beside Frame.io's definition and the two look contradictory. They are not. One is a category and the other is one member of it. Ross is naming a specific dialogue-only artefact; Frame.io is naming the family it belongs to. Somebody in commercial post using PROJECT_STRINGOUT for every usable take of a two-day shoot is using the same word for a much broader thing.

The practical consequence: a dialogue stringout of a four-hour interview day and a stringout of all usable footage from that day are different lengths, contain different material and are useful to different people.

What are selects?

The material somebody decided is worth carrying forward. Selects carry editorial judgement in a way a stringout does not.

In Editing the Documentary, Steve Shlisky puts the range of forms plainly: "Good clips trimmed, clips placed in folders, or interviews shortened into individual comments are called 'selects.'" So selects are not necessarily a sequence. They can be a bin, a folder, a set of subclips or a timeline, and the common factor is that a person looked at the pool and picked.

A "selects reel" is one packaging of that: the chosen material laid end to end as a single linear piece, usually so it can be watched or sent. Worth separating the two ideas, because the reel is a delivery format and the selects are the decision. You can have selects with no reel, and building the reel adds no information.

What is an assembly cut?

The first pass that imposes a story order. More shaped than a watch-everything stringout, and much rougher than a rough cut.

Karen Everett, who teaches documentary editing, calls the assembly "a quick and dirty first edit" and argues it should not exceed 140% of the intended final length. Take that 140% as her teaching rather than an industry rule. The reason behind it is the useful part, because she also says that cuts running four or five hours are "more accurately termed 'String Outs'." The distinction she is drawing is about intent. If the sequence is still showing you your options, it is a stringout regardless of what the file is called. Once it is attempting the story, it is an assembly.

Which is why "assembly" and "stringout" get swapped so freely. The same file can be both at different points in the week.

What is a radio cut or radio edit?

An audio-first story pass. The dialogue is laid out and ordered before any picture coverage, music or pacing goes on top.

Vashi Nedomansky, ACE, describes the approach as telling the story by laying out all the audio first. Oliver Peters offers the test that tells you whether the pass has worked: does the story work if you closed your eyes and only listened?

The overlap with the stringout is where confusion starts. Shane Ross uses "radio cut" as another name for his dialogue-stringout practice, so in that shop a radio cut is an early collection artefact. Elsewhere "radio edit" describes a later, deliberately shaped audio pass that has already made story decisions. Same phrase, two positions in the schedule. Ask which one is meant.

Where do dailies stringouts and paper edits fit?

A dailies stringout is the one that leaves the building. parker.mov describes it as "exported for the director, producers, and studio to review progress". The FSU Film Handbook draws the line cleanly: scene stringouts are internal and are not exported, while dailies stringouts are exported for production review.

That distinction is worth more than it looks. The export-for-outsiders artefact already has a name and a tradition. If you are being asked to show material to someone outside post, you are being asked for a dailies stringout, whatever the email calls it, and it should be cut down accordingly.

A paper edit is a text plan for arranging material before you touch a timeline: transcript excerpts arranged into an order, with source references beside them. The oldest verified source for the method is Peter Thompson's, released as freeware in 1989 and still online. A paper edit is written; a radio cut is audible. They are steps toward the same thing and they are not the same artefact, so do not use the terms interchangeably.

Where a stringout can go next

Once the artefact is defined, the file is just a long video, and a long video can be imported and split back into individually labelled shots — which is the subject of the sibling articles on turning a stringout into a searchable shot log and on presenting selects to someone outside the edit suite. Two constraints belong here rather than there: nothing derived from a rendered file carries the source's own start timecode, and there is no FCPXML, XML, EDL or AAF path back into a timeline.

How do the terms change by genre?

Work Usual stringout unit Usual selects unit What comes next Who sees it
Reality Multigroups, time-of-day timecode Story producer's paper cut Paper cut into a cut Story team
Documentary No formalised unit on record Selects by day, theme or character Paper edit, then radio cut Often nobody, because the editor is working alone
Commercial and corporate PROJECT_STRINGOUT PROJECT_SELECTS Client-facing selects Client or creative director

Scripted post sits outside the table and is the most formalised of the four: an assistant editor builds the scene stringouts and the dailies stringouts, and production review gets the dailies stringout. The naming conventions in the last row are observed practice rather than a standard. Editors report PROJECT_STRINGOUT becoming PROJECT_SELECTS, B_ROLL_STRINGOUT becoming B_ROLL_SELECTS, and bins named !Selects and !Soundups with a leading exclamation mark so they sort to the top of the project panel. Adopt them if they help; do not assume the next shop uses them.

What should you ask when someone requests a stringout?

Four questions, and they take a minute:

  1. Which footage belongs in it? Everything usable, one day, one subject, or dialogue only.
  2. What orders it? Shooting order, scene order, character, theme, or the order you think plays best.
  3. How tightly is it trimmed? Whole takes with heads and tails, or cut down to the usable part.
  4. Who opens it next, and where? An editor in the same project, or somebody with no NLE and no drive.

Two follow-ups decide the technical shape. Does the source filename and timecode need to travel with each moment, so the material can be found again? And is this artefact internal, or is it being exported for someone outside post? The second question is the FSU distinction, and answering it wrong is how a four-hour internal sequence ends up in a client's inbox.

"Scrub" describes an action, not a deliverable

There is no established artefact called a scrub. Scrubbing is dragging the playhead. One StoryFolder customer names their review-everything pass SCRUB v1 in board titles, which is a sensible private label for a real stage of work and is not vocabulary anybody else will recognise.

FAQ

Is a stringout the same thing as an assembly? No. A stringout shows you your options; an assembly attempts a story order. Karen Everett treats a four-to-five-hour "assembly" as a stringout by another name.

Is a rough cut a stringout? No. A rough cut has already made story and pacing decisions. A stringout is the pool those decisions get made from.

Are selects always a sequence? No. Steve Shlisky's definition covers trimmed clips, clips in folders and shortened interviews as well as a timeline.

Is a radio cut the same as a paper edit? No. A paper edit is a written plan; a radio cut is an audible sequence of the chosen audio. One usually precedes the other.

Do dailies and rushes mean different things? They are the same material. "Rushes" is the usual UK word and "dailies" the usual US one.

Which stringout gets sent outside post? The dailies stringout. The FSU Film Handbook records scene stringouts as internal and not exported.

Is "scrub" a stage of the edit? No. It is the verb for dragging the playhead. Any use of it as a deliverable name is somebody's local convention.

Sources

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