This post is part 3 of a series. For part 1, click here, or for part 2, click here.

Here are some more organizational tips to improve your assistant editing workflow.

7. Color code your clips and sequences.

Select the items you want colored in your bin, and choose “Set Clip Color” from the “Edit” menu. In general, avoid red (save it for indicating offline clips), but you can assign virtually any color to your clips and sequences (there are more options available than just the primary colors by selecting “Pick…”). There’s a lot of room for creativity here. You can use different colors for source clips, acquired footage, clips that need aspect ratio formatting, sound effects, music, sequences to output, or however else you see fit. If you select “Source” under “Clip Color” in the Timeline hamburger menu, the clips will show their colors within your sequence.

8. Use multiple timeline views.

In addition to clip colors, there are tons of settings in the Timeline hamburger menu that change what sort of information each clip in your timeline displays. You can choose to show clip names, media file names, clip durations, clip frames (thumbnails of each shot), clip resolutions, audio waveforms, and even comments. As with bin views, you can save a particular combination of settings that can easily be recalled at any time. The height of each track in the timeline (use Apple-K and Apple-L to resize them) also saves to these settings. I like to have different timeline views for when I’m working on audio (energy plot, thin video tracks, fat audio tracks, source clip colors); video (clip frames, thin audio tracks, fat video tracks, source clip colors); or sequence formatting (all thin tracks, offline clip colors).

9. Make cheat sheets for yourself.

Every time you do something complicated that requires a bunch of steps, write down the steps as you go along. Then next time you have to do it, you won’t miss anything along the way. I have a cheat sheet that I made up for my first uprez that I constantly modify based on the needs of the current project I’m working on. “How big should the handles be on the OMF I send to the mixer?” If you’ve done it before, check your cheat sheet!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this three-part series of organizational tips. If you have any tips you’d like to share, feel free to post them in the comments or e-mail them to me for inclusion in future posts.