I've spent a good 10 to 12 hours working on a video to be titled "Everglades National Jurassic Park".  The source of the video was an hour worth of footage that I shot on Saturday that I have currently whittled down to a little over fifteen minutes.  Last night I had my first "screening" of the rough cut and I got a pretty damn good idea what areas are too long and I'm pretty confident that I can trim the remaining five minutes out of the cut.

But what's interesting is the differences I'm seeing between editing this JP video versus a Talking Heads episode.  I'm getting ready to start working on episode 43 of Talking Heads, and this will prove to be a good 10-15 hour editing project, but the main difference is that there's a script that guides me the whole way.  When I was taping my footage on Saturday, I was a tourist in a park with a video camera.  The only unifying element is my quest for dinosaurs.

So there's a distinct difference between editing a "home movie" style project and editing a scripted production.  Granted, many of the same skills are used and both styles of projects rely heavily on the editor's ability to tell a concise story, it's just that the former leans on it far more than the latter.

What concerns me, however, is that there is such a thing as "too much editing".  While I do have YouTube's 10 minute limit that I need to work towards, I worry that I spend so much time with this footage, cutting and abbrievating sequences to tighten it up and bring down the length, that--in fact--I'm butchering the hell out of my video.

I guess you'll have to be the judge.  I'll probably finish it tonight and post it either tonight or tomorrow.  In the mean time, what has been the longest amount of time you've spent editing a video?  And for that matter, what has been your biggest challenge in video editing?