As a freelance business, I visit many offices from which I have received a problematic phone call. “Our in house editor is sick/vacation/doesn’t work here anymore/gave up/ran away and we need someone to come fix, um, I meant finish our production/broadcast/video for us.”
Learning on Avid and Final Cut Pro nearly at the same time taught me a very important lesson about video tracks. Get rid of them. If your show is going to color correction especially you don’t want to send an EDL to the colorist with 6 tracks of video with 70% clips that don’t need color. It’s a bad habit.
I noticed that some editors like to have 4-5 videos tracks and more than 80% of the clips are disabled or covered up by layers of clips on higher tracks. Sometimes they are there for the sake of knowing where the video is to the existing audio track you have on the timeline. Your sequence should not be your bin. There are other tools for organizing media. Now, there are such things as selects sequences, match frame, reveal master clip (FCP)/ find bin (avid) that will help you keep track of the media.
Overall this is mostly a rant. If I walk into your project and see layers of video piled up, I will judge you by your timeline.
Amen …. that’s a post!
Having learned Avid first the work flow was such that I always minimized tracks. FCP opened me up to stacking and I must say while in the creative process I like to stack and I’ve built some sequence skyscrapers. As the cut matures I clean it up and minimize the amount of tracks up to the point of avoiding nests. If I plan to run off/quit/be fired/dissappeared/hushed/re-appointed/vacate/vanish/go-to-the-bathroom I hope that I have minimized tracks before handing a seq on to another editor. Shame on me if I haven’t. I must agree that I’ve seem some sequence doozies and it’s never pretty and reflects bad form.
I’ve never really been a stacker, when I cut I almost always stick to 1-2 video tracks unless I actually need to stack for effects.
As an online editor I’ve received some shocking sequences. Obviously before I capture I usually have to try and make some sense of the sequence just so I don’t spend hours more than I need to batch capturing. It can be pretty difficult with no online media, but you get pretty good at understanding the timeline visually.
I think there is a difference when you have a purpose and when you are being lazy. Sadly I think that students learning Final Cut Pro from a younger age, and not having to deal with Avid, have not been discouraged from holding back on the stacking. Batch capturing is a great point Dylan.
I didn’t think about how it applies to After Effects too. I once freelanced with a place that had an 8 minute After Effects sequence instead of a composition for each shot. So guess what happens when you have 8 minutes worth of 2K Red proxies and you have one typo? That’s right, nearly 5 hours of rendering overnight. I guess that is another post for another time.
Yes!
Judge you by your timeline, and by your desktop…
Yeah, I have to admit to being at fault alot here. Not having had to learn Avid, I like to be sloppy when editing and then go back and clean it up before handing it off to someone. And having worked this way, I find it easier to look at a messy timeline like that, because I put all of my interviews on one track, all of my random b-roll on another, and my AE graphics on a third. So I can quickly jump to any given shot by seeing where it lies vertically.
Alan, there is a difference here though. You just explained some sort of organization you had with a selects type of sequence. The difference between this example and yours is that in the picture above, that is the edit, the final edit.
For some reason I see this far more often on FCP sequences than Avid. I think FCP’s crappy trim tool is to blame – it’s far easier to do asymmetric trim operations in FCP if the clips are on different layers.
That said – I can’t imagine needing more than 2 layers to edit your primary video track like that. FX etc, fine – but that screenshot is horrible.
Besides the trim tool, I think the biggest reason is that more and more editors are self-taught rather than really learning how to edit by being a true assistant. Unfortunately it’s much more difficult to get real editing experience as an assist these days vs. 10 or even 5 years ago.
I was able to actually SIT IN THE BAY with the editor when I was an assist. This allowed me to formulate good habits when editing because I actually watched him work. This is an aspect of the craft that is quickly going away. I can’t remember the last time an assist actually was able to sit in with me. It’s sad really…
I don’t know…I think that’s pretty reasonable. I expected much worst, anyway.
I’m an assist and I prefer to have the paper trail, especially with AE titles. If a final edit has AE titles baked-in but a client asks for that shot in a new project, I can usually rely on my editor leaving the title-less version in a layer below.
It’s also great to leave old versions in place, so you can quickly match frames when laying in new revisions (also easy to find what exactly a revision was if you can reference the track below and visually locate the change).
This is all great for small teams…sharing sequences with strangers opens a whole new ballgame, one I think you guys are focused more on.
[…] asked him if I could re-post the piece in its entirety on the Studio Daily blog. It’s called I Will Judge You By Your Sequence. It’s a mini-rant on the somewhat common practice today of turning over a disorganized and […]
Andy: Seems like a lot of your suggestions could easily be handled by duplicating sequences and archiving. Granted, having tons of extra sequences in a project file will increase the file size, but holding onto a select few for purposes of remembering certain revisions isn’t too cumbersome.
Ignoring FX, mattes, and other composites, I try to limit my editing to two video tracks, and I always, ALWAYS have my audio assigned to specific tracks (camera audio on 1 & 2, VO on 4 & 5, music on 6 & 7, etc.). Once I am in the fine cut stage, I do as much as I can to collapse the video tracks into one.
Hello my name is richard and i have been editing for 6yrs now, you can see my work on the website. thank you.
I try to keep m timelne organized for my own sake when workng but when I’m thinkng aloud so to speak the sequeance starts to get ugly but the point mentioned here many times is to clean it up and refine. Like you do to your edit
A fascinating discussion is worth comment.
I do think that you ought to write more about this issue,
it may not be a taboo matter but generally people do
not discuss these subjects. To the next! All the best!!