How to decide whether to cut around an AI flaw or regenerate the shot

You have a clip that is almost right. The performance is good, the light matches the rest of the scene, and then at 3.2 seconds a hand grows a sixth finger, or a background figure melts into a doorframe, or the character's collar flickers between two shapes. Your instinct is to hit regenerate. Sometimes that is correct. Often it is how a solo creator loses an afternoon and a third of a credit budget chasing a take that was already usable.

The opposite habit is just as costly. You keep a flawed shot because you are tired, and the artefact sits in your timeline like a pebble in a shoe. Every viewer who watches it twice will find it. What you need is a fast, repeatable rule for deciding which flaws to hide in the edit and which to pay to fix. Here is the one to run on every flagged clip.

The three-question triage

Play the flawed clip once at full speed, then answer these in order.

1. How long is the flaw on screen? Under half a second is a candidate for cutting around. Over a second, or recurring, means regenerate.
2. Is the flaw on the subject or the periphery? A glitch on a face or the hands the viewer is watching is hard to hide. A glitch in the background, a prop, or the edge of frame is easy to hide.
3. Does the shot need the flawed moment? If the story beat lands before or after the flaw, you do not need the flawed frames at all.

Two or more answers in the cuttable direction, and you edit. Otherwise you regenerate. Write the verdict in your selects sheet next to the clip name so you are not re-deciding tomorrow.

Four ways to cut around a flaw

When the triage says edit, pick the lightest tool that works.

- Trim it out. If the flaw lives in the last 12 frames, end the shot earlier. Most AI clips run slightly long anyway, so you lose nothing.
- Cutaway over it. Keep the audio and the shot underneath, and lay a reaction shot, an insert, or a detail over the flawed half second. This is the oldest trick in documentary editing and it works because the viewer wants to see what the other character is thinking.
- Punch in. Scale the clip to 120 or 130 per cent and reposition so the flaw sits outside the frame. Check your source resolution first, and upscale before you punch in, not after.
- Freeze or slow the neighbouring frames. If a single frame is bad, duplicate the frame before it for two frames and cut on the next action. At 24 frames per second, two held frames read as a beat, not an error.

When to regenerate, and how to cap it

Regenerate when the flaw is on the face or hands for more than a second, when it repeats in every take of that shot, or when the shot has no cutaway option because it is your only angle on that moment. If the third attempt shows the same flaw, stop. Change the prompt, not the dice: simplify the action, shorten the clip length, or move the awkward detail out of frame. Set a ceiling of three regenerations per shot, and log each in your version names so you can go back to take two if take four is worse.

What you should see

Before, your timeline is full of clips you resent and a credit counter that drops faster than your cut improves. After, each flagged clip has a verdict, most of them resolved with a trim or a cutaway in under two minutes, and your regenerations are spent only on shots that genuinely need them. Watch the cut back with fresh eyes the next morning. The flaws you hid should be invisible, and the shots you regenerated should be the strongest in the sequence.

Try this next

Open your current project, scrub through it once, and mark every flagged clip with a colour label. Run the three questions on each one and fix only the cuttable ones before you spend a single credit.