South Africa, April 24 -- The pacing feels slightly off, the tone doesn't fully land, and a scene that looked convincing on paper struggles to hold together on screen.

Nothing is obviously broken, but the piece as a whole lacks cohesion.

At that point, the work shifts into adjustment. Tightening, restructuring, removing, and reworking, all in an effort to shape something coherent out of material that was never fully aligned to begin with. For a long time, this has been accepted as part of the editing craft. In reality, it is not a creative problem, it is a process problem. To be more specific, it is a timing problem.

Editing has been happening too late

In most production workflows, alignment does not happen in a single, unified moment...