How to log footage: markers, bins, subclips and favourites

What does logging footage mean?

Logging footage means watching your material before you edit and writing down what is in it, where, and whether it is any good. On a documentary that once meant a log sheet: timecode, a description, a keyword or two, and a mark for the good takes. Today the log lives inside the editor, attached to the footage itself, but the job is the same.

It pays off twice. You find things in seconds later, instead of scrubbing an hour of rushes for one line. And you judge the material while it is fresh, before a rough cut makes you attached to the wrong take. These are the tools, and what each is for:

How do markers work in Sharpy?

In video editing, a marker is a flag on the timeline that says "something is here". In Sharpy a marker has a note and a kind: a note to come back to, a question for a person, a fault something measured, or a chapter. The kind is its colour and how the agent reads it, and a question marker is often one the agent could not answer itself.

1. Place it. Choose Markers ▸ Add Range Marker in the window, or ask the agent, which adds and edits markers with edit_marker.
2. Write its words. Double-click the marker's flag, or choose Markers ▸ Edit the Marker at the Playhead…, and give it a note and a kind. Editing is one undo step and keeps the marker's place.
3. Remove it with ⌥-click. A marker cannot be emptied, only removed.

Sharpy places markers of its own too. When its review finds a fault, the marker sits at the second it happened, not in a paragraph of a report. Chapters go further: they are written into the finished file as a chapter list players read, and into the description as YouTube timestamps where YouTube's chapter rules allow them.

What is a range marker, and why does it move with the cut?

A range marker covers a stretch instead of an instant. Choose Markers ▸ Add Range Marker and it covers In to Out, or five seconds when nothing is marked. Drag an end to change its length, drag the bar to move it, ⌥-drag an instant marker to stretch it, or drag the ends together to make an instant again. The length is always written on the bar. Markers ▸ Set In and Out from Marker turns it back into marks, so its stretch can be played, looped, lifted or extracted.

Markers ride with the material. With Markers ▸ Ripple Markers on, which it is in every new edit, a cut that removes or moves time on the edit's first track takes the markers with it, whoever made the cut: you in the window, the agent cutting words, or the command line taking out silences. A range marker loses what is cut out of it and gains what is put in. One whose whole stretch is cut is left as an instant, never deleted, so the note survives.

How do subclips, favourites and rejects work?

They are one record for a stretch of a file and what you say about it: a name (that makes it a subclip), a rating (favourite or reject), keywords and a note. Log before you cut:

1. Open a file as the source. Double-click it in the bin and it plays as shot, with its own In and Out.
2. Mark a stretch. I and O, or leave it unmarked to log the whole file.
3. Rate or name it. Choose Markers ▸ Favourite, Reject or Make Subclip…, and Unrate to take a rating off. ⌘U makes a subclip on the Premiere keys; F and U favourite and unrate on the Final Cut keys.
4. Add keywords and a note so search finds it later.

The bin draws favourites green and rejects red along each file's card and lists subclips as cards after their file. Filter it by All Clips, Favourites, Rejected or Unused, and search by name, keyword and note. A subclip opens as the source already marked, so Insert and Overwrite take exactly that stretch; dragged to the timeline, it lays down just that stretch. The agent logs with log_source.

How do you organise footage for editing?

You organise footage for editing by sorting files into bins by what they are, then rating the stretches inside each, so the cut starts from your selects rather than from everything. A common set of bins: interview, B-roll, music, sound effects, graphics.

In Sharpy, File ▸ New Bin… (⌘B on the Premiere keys, ⇧⌘N on the Final Cut keys) makes a bin. Bins live in the edit and nest, a file sits in one bin at most, and a deleted bin hands its contents to its parent. The agent keeps files in the same bins you see (edit_bin).

Switch the bin to a list and you get columns: Name, Kind, Duration, Content Created, Frame Rate, Frame Size, Used, Logged, Bin and Status, with File Size, Modified and Path to turn on. Click a header to sort. Sort by Content Created to put phone clips back in the order they were shot, and read Status to see whether a file is on this disk, in iCloud or missing. Smart bins gather clips by rules over your logging, and on the timeline you can label clips by colour, all your B-roll one colour and the interview another, then pick a group up again with Select Clips With This Label.

How do you turn one long recording into many clips?

Mark it, then export the marks. For one stretch, mark In and Out and tick Only between In and Out in the export panel: only that stretch renders, and captions written beside it are cut to it and timed from its first frame. In a test where every frame was a different grey, frames 20 to 29 came out as exactly those ten frames, in order.

For many, put a range marker over each moment and choose File ▸ Export Each Marked Stretch…. Every range marker becomes its own file in one folder, named after its marker, with the same choices as any export, captions beside each included. Names are made safe for the Finder and never duplicated. That is how a two-hour podcast becomes a folder of clips; how to turn a long video into shorts covers choosing the moments.

When you hand the edit to Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve as FCPXML, the log goes with it: a chapter becomes a chapter marker, a question or fault a to-do, a note a marker, each with its length. Ratings, keywords and subclips go too. Bins stay in Sharpy, and the file says so. What is an edit decision list explains the formats.