Assembly cut

Also called a stringout, the assembly is the pass where you drop every take worth keeping onto the timeline in story order and watch the whole thing through. Music, graphics and tightening all wait. A 12-minute video will often have a 40-minute assembly.

What you are looking for is structure. Which section sits in the wrong place, which one repeats the one before it, where the argument actually starts. Editors who go straight to a fine cut end up polishing a sequence that should have been deleted.