The other day I read a blog post on the Post Fifth Pictures site that was so funny, so spot on and true that I contacted the author and 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 sloppy timeline to another editor.

Comments and Twitter discussion afterward pointed the finger at Final Cut Pro editors more than any other but that’s more of a generalization. It’s the more inexperienced FCP editors or FCP editor who’s never had experience working in a real offline to online environment or with other editors that are mostly at fault.

IMHO it’s fine to keep a sloppy timeline while editing as there are often reasons to stack clips. But when turing the edit over to someone else it’s best to clean your timeline. Any clips that are under other clips are only wasted space when you have to recapture for online if someone doesn’t have to take time to prep. If doing color grading you can’t pull an EDL for the colorist. A big timeline takes up screen real estate unnecessarily.

Thanks to Bryce Randle for the permission to re-post his post! Here’s the piece in it’s entirety:

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.

Now click over to the original to see the timeline that inspired it all!

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