I'm currently working on a short piece that is mostly talking heads/interviews and I'm reminded of the importance of logging, transcribing and sub-clipping interview footage. Whether you shot the interviews--or conducted the interviews--or both, if you've got the task of editing the interviews you're going to need to become very familiar with what each person said as you start to weave together a narrative. Whether you've got two or twenty interviewees, knowing what they said, and where those sound bites live, is critical. And the only way to do that is with extensive organization. Editing is essentially organization of raw material into a new form...one that is much more efficient and effective at telling the story that needs to be told.
You start by watching the interviews, perhaps several times over. As you watch, you might begin to take notes...jotting down ideas that come to mind about how a particular bite might fit into the larger story. You might note good in and out points...places where the conversation feels like it starts and stops. You might note technical concerns, e.g. framing, exposure, audio hits, etc., that might prevent a particular bite from being used. You certainly want to note which themes are present in each interview. Will this particular sound bite work in the intro where you're trying to set the scene...or will it work as a counter-point to that other sound bite that you plan to use from another interviewee? These are the kinds of notes that you will turn to over and over again in the edit suite.
No one likes to transcribe interviews, which is why there are companies that you can pay to do the work for you. But if you're on a budget--and seriously, who isn't--you will likely do some transcribing yourself. Write down every word or at lease the gist of every phrase. The parts that you skip over will frequently be the very bites that you need tomorrow or next week...and then you'll need to resort to scanning through many minutes or hours of interview footage trying to find it. Believe me, a little extra time now will save you that time many times over.
And finally, don't underestimate the value of subclipping. All pro NLE software tools allow you subclip a video clip into smaller units. Your interview may be 20-30 minutes long, but you can subclip the interview into 15-30 second bites and name each one accordingly. Now, instead of finding that one bite in the middle of a half-hour interview, you simply look for that subclip that you've named and labeled with keyword descriptors. Also, you can use color coding to group types of soundbites/subclips into themes.
Organization...its the stuff of editing. You can only begin to be creative after you've found a way to locate your shots and sound bites.
