The Importance of a Selects Timeline
If you’re anything like me, you leave a shoot with way too much footage. I find that I shoot more footage than I could ever use, and a bunch of it isn’t terrible! So how do I sort through all of that footage in post production? I make a selects timeline! Today I’m going to cover the importance of making a selects timeline and walk you through my methodology!
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First things first - what is a selects timeline? A selects timeline is literally just a timeline that contains all of your best shots! When you go out to film, you’ll frame up the perfect shot and get ready to capture it. But how often do you hit record and then suddenly the moment is gone? The problem is, you’ve already got that shot sitting in your collection. It’s too dangerous to go and delete it, as you lose valuable filming time AND run the risk of accidentally deleting a clip you want to keep, so there it sits just messing up your organization. Or, let’s say you’ve got a beautiful shot, but it’s really only the middle 10 seconds of a 25 second clip that are something you’d want to use. A selects timeline means you’ve got the best portion of that footage ready at your fingertips for when you need to drop it into an edit.
A selects timeline has two main uses. As we’ve covered, it lets you weed through the “not so good” shots and get rid of them, but it also saves you time down the line. For example, if you’ve told a story of an outreach you held in February and captured a bunch of great footage, you may want to pull from that footage for an end-of-year recap video. When you sort through all of your footage in a project, that footage just sits in that project and makes it harder to use it again in the future. You’ve got to either sort through all of your footage again to find the good pieces, or pull from your final export of the project which means you may not have a long enough clip to pull for your new edit. When you make a selects timeline you can export the full timeline and archive it away. That way when you’re working on that end of year recap, you can just pull in that selects timeline and suddenly you’ve got a whole string of clips worth using.
So what are the ground rules for making a proper selects timeline? Let’s dig into the details of how I make my selects timelines and archive them for future use!
HOW-TO
First, how do I cut my selects timelines? I typically will drop all of my footage into a single timeline. You want to make sure whatever editor you’re using gives you a timeline that is the same resolution and frame rate as the footage you’re using, which is typically the default for editors when you drag in new footage. If you’re using high frame rate footage that you want to conform into slow motion, you can use the frame rate that you’ll be editing your project in and conform the footage to that speed. That’s a topic I plan to cover at a later date, but if you’re curious now there’s tons of videos discussing this idea.
Once I have all of my footage in a timeline, now comes the monotonous part. I scrub through all of the footage and cut out the portions that are downright bad to unusable. You’re not trying to trim the footage to make it snappy or high energy, just trying to weed out the portions you MIGHT use in an edit. So you’re cutting out the shots that didn’t work out, the moments you bumped the camera, the times you accidentally missed hitting record and then walked around for 30 seconds looking for your next shot…not that I ever do that. When making these cuts, I typically like to leave just a bit more on either end of each clip just so I have some buffer. You can always trim the footage back later, but you can’t add footage you cut out.
Once I’ve gotten all of the shots trimmed up and have only the footage I might use in an edit, I go ahead and organize it all. This is completely arbitrary based on whatever makes sense to you. For instance, I frequently film footage of services at churches. I grab footage of preservice, during the service, the kids areas, and whatever else they may want me to capture. I don’t always film all the same sections all at once, though. I may get preservice type footage before and after service, or get kids area footage during the message time which is in the middle of the service. As a result, it’s all out of order. In my selects timeline, I go and put all shots with similar themes all together. That way when I’m editing and pulling from selects, I know all my worship footage is together, or all my meet and greet preservice type footage is together. I also get rid of any gaps between footage so it’s just a constant flow of footage. You can add in breaks between sections, or even mini slates if you’d like, but you don’t want dead space so that your final export stays smaller.
One other thing I like to do is put a slate up front. A slate is just a still image at the start of footage that explains technical details to anyone who needs to use the footage. It’s a similar idea to the slate that they hold up before a shot in Hollywood. I don’t always film on the same types of cameras or at the same framerate, so I want to make it clear to myself in the future. The slate contains whatever information you think will be helpful, but here’s what I typically like to include:
Which camera I’m filming on
The frame rate I shot at
If I conformed the footage, what did I conform to
Any changes I made to the color grade beyond sublte adjustments (Usually just saying what LUT I used)
This doesn’t need to be fancy. It’s just there so that six months from now you can recall the details about the footage in case you need to change anything to use it in your project.
Speaking of color grade adjustments, you don’t necessarily want to heavily stylize your footage similarly to how you’d tweak it in your edit. For instance, if you’re editing a project where you want to give your footage a more vintage feeling and you’re tweaking it that way in editing, you don’t want to do the same to your selects footage. You want to keep is as neutral as possible so you’re free to make tweaks to it in your future edits without being backed into any specific looks. You also don’t want to add in any fades, transitions, or anything else that you can’t edit out in the future.
Once you’ve sorted through all the footage, all that’s left is the export! I typically make my initial selects timeline within the project I’m using the footage in so I can just natively pull shots as needed from one timeline to the next, but you want to make an export of it so you can pull it into future projects. You want to export as high quality as you can, aiming to match whatever format your initial footage was shot at. So if you shot 4k Prores footage on your Smartphone, you’d want to export a 4k Prores sequence at the same quality. If you can’t match the exact file format, go for the highest quality you can so you have minimal data loss. This all will depend on the editing platform you’re using as well as the options available. Once that’s done, go ahead and archive it somewhere so you can grab it again in the future! If you’re storing it on your phone, make a folder in your photos that’s “Events Selects” so you have them all together. Or, if you’re archiving to Dropbox or some other cloud platform, make a folder in there that will make it easy to find the footage again.
That’s it! It’s nothing fancy in the end, but it gives you an easy way to grab b-roll footage in the future and pull from it as needed without needing to go back to the source. This has saved me so many hours of work as I’ve had to pull from older footage for clients in order to tell stories. This allows you to save your future-self time while keeping your project organized as your tell your current story.
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