![]() ![]() I’ve watched many online tutorials and experimented with ordinary mice, gaming mice, ergonomic mice, track balls, Wacoms, even game pads. Because of this, I’ve come across some very cool, quick ways of doing things in one bit of software but can’t always transfer that way of working to others (like a lot of editors, I often don’t get to choose the software). I’ve used FCP X a little for editing and I use DaVinci Resolve quite extensively for grading. I’ve often had clients amazed at how I manage to “remember” who liked what takes, and why.Īnother factor is that after 21 years in the cutting room, I’ve cut TV shows, TV commercials, music videos and films in Avid, Premiere Pro, FCP7 and on Lightworks. Even if I open that project five years later, I will still have all of that info available to me, at a glance. This way I can find, at a glance, every moment that every relevant person liked or wanted to try. Instead of loading clips into a source monitor, one-by-one, and looking for those marks, I make the marks on the stringout. I only find that beneficial in very rare cases. In fact, I know assistants who have been asked to do stringouts line-by-line-every instance of the first line of dialog for the scene, followed by every instance of the next line of dialogue, and so on. Stuff the client (or exec producer) likesĪ lot of feature and drama editors get the assistant editors to do these stringouts because it can be quite laborious but I find it a good way to start getting familiar with the footage.I have a separate color marker for each of the stages: But that’s a topic for another article.)Īpart from the fact that I need a quick way to stringout the dailies, I also have a way of keeping all that info in one place using markers. (Note: You could use this method in FCP X too, but its range-tagging and browser clip management system accomplish many of the functions stringouts provide in other NLEs. Stringout (with cut on a separate tab or panel: I prefer the latter because I use a keyboard shortcut to switch between timelines and I don’t like the lack of screen real estate you get with pancake timelines (I also don’t like the name pancake timelines!) In Premiere you can use pancake timelines, use a timeline as a source, or simply have two timelines open and jump between the two. In Avid, you can cut from one timeline to another (you can also view your source timeline). I add markers to this stringout sequence and I cut from this stringout sequence only, rather than from the clips themselves. My preferred workflow involves stringouts for each scene, where I lay the dailies for that scene end-to-end. When the cappuccinos have arrived, the wifi passwords handed out, the lunch orders placed, and I finally have the attention of all the people in the room, I need to keep that attention. Whether on my own or with clients, when I’m in the creative zone and on a roll, the last thing I want is to have my thought process interrupted because I can’t remember what alternate takes we have, or because I need to go searching through bins. Basically, “sharpening my axe.”Ī lot of my work is spent on TV drama, films, or commercials, where I have a director or clients in the room, but I need to do a fair amount of creative cutting on my own before I present the cut and do work with clients. My approach to editing is simple: I spend a lot of time preparing my project, getting to know the dailies, and making sure that everything is as I need it, so I can concentrate on the cut. And this translates well into my line of work. I have added a README comment and renamed most actions so it’s (hopefully) easy to understand the approach.“If I had six hours to cut down large a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.” As with most things, I am sure I’ll tweak this over time to make it better, faster, less “error”-prone, etc. At first I dismissed the idea as being “too much work.” After thinking about it for a moment, though, I realized I could MacGyver this relatively quickly with my favorite Mac application, Keyboard Maestro. It occurred to me it’d be useful to just pop into VS Code quickly to edit the doc, then bring those edits back into the Bookstack editor in Chrome. ![]() Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t show realtime feedback in the preview pane until I save and close out of the virtual editor. I have a Chrome extension called Wasavi, which is incredible for editing text areas in an inline virtual Vim window. I love the UI (shown below) but unfortunately I cannot move around in the editor like I can in PHPStorm or VS Code, where I have Vim support. There is a markdown pane on the left and a preview on the right. It’s a fantastic documentation system built with Laravel. Okay, so it’s not quite as amazing as the title suggests, but this solution is worth sharing. ![]()
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