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Task Guide: Cutting and Color-Grading a Violin Maker Workshop Documentary

These guides describe the documented upstream workflow. XiFilm integration and installers are still in development; Alpha is free. Availability in a XiKey release has not yet been verified.

Scenario

You are editing a short documentary portrait of a master violin luthier carving a spruce soundboard and applying amber oil varnish. You want to assemble the interview spine from the transcript in the Text panel, intercut B-roll using three-point editing and J/L split cuts, grade the flat log camera footage in Lumetri Color while monitoring skin and wood tones on the Vectorscope and RGB Parade, and create SRT subtitles.

Step-by-Step Workflow

1. Assemble the Interview Spine and Cut B-Roll with Three-Point Editing

  1. Open the luthier interview sequence and open the Text panel. Navigate through the spoken transcript segments with the arrow keys and press Backspace to Ripple Delete (extract) pauses or false starts.
  2. In the Project panel, hover-scrub (Shift+H) over the close-up B-roll clips of wood-plane shavings and soundboard tap-tuning, press I and O to mark the best action range in the Source Monitor, target track V2 in the Timeline, and press . (Overwrite) to lay the B-roll over the interview cuts.
  3. Adjust interview audio and video edit points separately to create a J-cut, with sound beginning before the matching picture.

2. Balance Exposure and Wood Warmth in Lumetri Color

  1. Select the B-roll clips on V2 and open the Lumetri Color and Lumetri Scopes panels.
  2. Under Basic Correction, adjust temperature and exposure while watching the RGB Parade. Keep highlights from clipping and judge levels using your footage.
  3. Under Color Wheels & Match and HSL Secondary, isolate the amber oil varnish hues and check the Vectorscope to keep the luthier's skin tones aligned along the skin-tone line.

3. Add Captions and Send to the Export Queue

  1. In the Text / Captions workflow, create or import SRT / WebVTT subtitle segments on the sequence's dedicated Caption track and style them in Essential Graphics.
  2. Use Send to Export Queue to queue an MP4 master, then export captions as a sidecar SRT or burn them into the picture. Check video and captions together.

Sources

Upstream version checked on 2026-10-14.