A teacher once told me no video is ever finished. You just get tired of it.

If you travel to, say, the Svalbard Archipelago in Northern Norway to shoot video, eventually you go home, and that's the end of shooting. If you live just down the road from a place you like to shoot, you might be tempted to go back just one more time to get a better shoot, and the video will never be finished.

With photographs, I have an easier time, because I can send out a few pictures at the end of the day, even if I later go back to a place. However, eventually a video has to be edited.

I usually control the impulse to get another shot by setting an arbitrary time limit. For example, I say, I will leave at 10:00 AM when the sun makes images harsh looking. I've been working on a video of a small pool or wetland at the Ruth Oliva Preserve in East Marion, Long Island, New York, which is just down the road, for almost a year. Although it's a good spot, I started to grow tired of it. I finally said I'd finish shooting on June 4.

Here's a link to the Wetlands video.

https://youtu.be/5oj3DnmO5a8

For me, there is certainly an end. usually when the edit is approved and the invoice is paid. In the big budget movie market, the same thing usually happens - it's edited, approved and gets a release date. Unless you're Ridley Scott and do a Directors cut each year for ever and ever (Blade Runner fans understand this one), you must stop. Art movies can be tinkered with for ever and never get finished, but they rarely pay the bills - as they're just personal projects.

Of course. How foolish of me to forget that many are making videos for a living, with a schedule to meet. I apologize to all those who have to finish on time for forgetting them. My remark only really applies to folks working on a personal project..

I agree as a keen amateur wildlife video man. There's always time for another go, another shot. Unless of course one's on holiday with a plane to catch at the end. Even then, like me in Cairns Australia last year, go back for more, as I was to later this year until CV-19 intervened.

When I edit an occasional long movie, 60 minutes plus, to show at local bird clubs and the like, I find having a deadline to meet e.g. that first meeting, is often the only way to completion. Then that's that. By which time anyway one's sick and tired of watching and tinkering with the same old stuff.

Ron

Gotcha! I can only speak for myself, but my personal projects have a habit of never getting finished. When I taught media to 18 yr olds I always used to say the phrase "that all do" just meant it wasn't perfect, and accepting that and moving on was actually a failure, but as I've got older, I've actually got less patience for gilding the lily. I do say that will do often because as a product gets towards perfect the time input produces less output, and I get bored. I wrote a piece of music in 94, and it earned me quite a bit over the years and it had a mistake in it. In lockdown I decided to rerecord it and fix it. I never finished it, and am living with the old version again. My enthusiasm for it has gone.

I dont really do it with video projects, but I (also) write/play/record/mix music—-not in a professional capacity. I generally decide a mix (or recording process) is “done” when I cant take it any farther without spending days or weeks on a 1% increase in quality or starting over completely (you use a “reference mix”...a commercial release thats a similar style of song to compare your mix to and basically match, with allowances/deviations for your own creativity/style to shine through). When I feel I cant get any closer to the reference mix, I’m “done”.