Editing & Post-Production
Paper edit
Also called: transcript edit plan, edit outline
A paper edit is the edit decided in writing. You take the transcript of your footage, delete what is not going in, move what is left into the order the video needs, and only then open the editing software.
It is the standard approach for interviews and anything talky, because structural questions are far easier to answer in text. Cutting a paragraph takes a second on a page and a slow minute on a timeline. Plenty of editors now do this through text-based editing, where deleting a word removes the matching frames.