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Tag, you’re it.
Since we’re days away from Mavericks tags becoming a relevant part of our production process, I’d like to find out from some of you critical thinkers how we might best implement them in our production workflows.
You might want to start with this article:
https://www.macworld.com/article/2043164/hands-on-with-os-x-mavericks-finder-tabs-and-tagging.htmlI have upgraded all my home systems (two macbook airs and a 2012 iMac) to Mavs and it’s pretty cool. I was very curious how Mavericks would handle tags on shared storage, dropbox, etc. So far, it appears that if you tag a file in dropbox that is shared between multiple users, it WILL be tagged for all with the finder color you assign, but it WILL NOT rename the finder color for the other users. For example, I share a dropbox with my wife, and I tagged all invoices and business related docs with a blue circle from the sidebar, which I then renamed ‘biz’. On my wife’s computer the blue circle’s name stayed ‘blue’, but all the files I tagged to the blue circle showed up correctly. Now, here’s something interesting. If you are using the same iCloud account, the tag WILL RENAME ITSELF automatically for all systems. What does this mean? Well, a team is going to have to get in sync on what tags are used, where they’re used, and WHEN they’re used.
I’m still in the process of figuring this out mind you, but I’m thinking that since we work with so many networks, obviously they’ll get specific tags. Every file will be tagged first for the network the file is affiliated. All systems will use these same tag names so that we are completely consistent through our system. Further, we’re going to have a single iCloud account for all editor’s and designers, so that when one person creates a new tag, ALL users will be affected and maintain sync.
Because we work heavily in a shared NAS, it’s most important that we tag files within the NAS. But tags go beyond that. The same tag used in iCloud, dropbox, and the NAS will all show up for the specific user – this is awesome. Half the time I quickly save a file to iCloud because I don’t have time to navigate to the appropriate folder (client/scripts/project name, for example), so a quick tag will help me find that script. Pretty cool.
Now for the “when”. What if we made specific tags that we remove when we don’t want them anymore? For example, using ‘current projects’ as a tag will quickly get us to projects that are currently in production. When we make a delivery on that project, we delete all files from that tag and put it to bed. This one could be pretty awesome but I’m curious if it’ll work because I don’t see a super easy way to temp tag or remove tags in bulk. If that doesn’t work, then perhaps there’s an ‘archive’ tag that we can use, which we could specify in a ‘current’ smart folders to not be visible when searching through the current tag associated with that smart folder.
I’m thinking we’ll have tags for network, sponsor, media type (logos, for example), current, archive, and project name.
There’s lots to think about here, but tags have some pretty awesome potential. In terms of FCPX, I cannot imagine that tags won’t be in some way relevant to the potential big reveal of FCPX 10.1 on Tuesday. If tags can be associated with keyword tags upon import, for example, that could be pretty dang awesome!
Have any of you thought of some cool ways to use tags in ways that might help overall production?
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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18 Replies
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I’m just gonna pop in with some of my recent experiences that may or may not be relevant.
First, is the stunning lack of any even basic industry standards out there when it comes to even the most elementary areas of tagging and keywording “best practices” is gonna get weird, fast.
I spent the past week working with a wonderful young producer from our local Fox Affiliate on a show – she’s smart as a whip and has been producing the morning news for some years. She was astonished to see me using even the most basic metadata and tagging concepts like using leading zeros for sort. She lit up with delight when she learned you can USE ID tags to sort stuff.
Now we get the TOOL in Maverics – but understandably, no common standards for how to use it. And thats OK because the tools is supposed to a thing that can solve different problems for different users flexibly – I get that. But I can also easily see 10,000 shops using the color RED to indicate 5,000 different things. (guessing the other 50% of them will settle on RED means “hot file”???
And I suspect that as these tags become more transportable, you’ll get shop A tagging RED to mean Voiceover (or Title, or USed, or whatever) and sending that file into a system that uses RED internally to mean “burn/delete this old file!)
This is surely going to be interesting!
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Bill Davis] “But I can also easily see 10,000 shops using the color RED to indicate 5,000 different things.”
Yep. That’s kind of why I started this thread. I’d like to see how others intend to approach tags. Obviously without FCPX 10.1 in hand, we’ve no idea exactly how Finder tags will interact with X, but I think it should be interesting and it would be great to develop a workflow to take advantage of tags.
Part of me wants to really implement this like crazy – and then I go into our older mac and select red, and half a dozen random files that were labeled the color red in Mountain Lion on my wife’s account show up, and it makes no sense. PLUS, you’re going to run out of colors really fast, so red is going to end up being half a dozen different things no matter what approach you take – assuming you get really serious about tags.
I do wonder if Tags are going to be one of those concepts that rolls out in Mavs, but won’t really get powerful until OSX 11 “Fresno”.
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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[John Davidson] “PLUS, you’re going to run out of colors really fast,”
Well, they could build in the entire Pantone deck!
“Hey Bob, what did we use PMS-220 to mean last time?”
That’d be kinda cool. Maybe?
Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.
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[Charlie Austin] “Hey, did you get my earlier reply about changing tags in bulk?”
I saw it right after you posted and then it disappeared. NSA.
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I did -sorry I was distracted by the Xbox :). Yeah, that’s simple enough on shared systems where no particular user has ownership. Odd though, some of the files I dropbox tagged last night didn’t come across to a different computer with dropbox also on it. Not quite sure why…
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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[Bill Davis] “This is surely going to be interesting!”
By interesting, did you mean it’s going to be the wild west all over again?
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill
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[John Davidson] “Odd though, some of the files I dropbox tagged last night didn’t come across to a different computer with dropbox also on it. Not quite sure why..”
FWIW, there’s a new version of Drop Box out… maybe that’ll help?
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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~ -
I’m up to date. I just have to sign in to my wife’s account and delete the color labels she had going and start fresh with tags. Probably a complete system wipe wouldn’t hurt….
John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.
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Hey John –
You’re on to something here. I’ve been experimenting with them, too, with Mavs. For me, lone gun that I am, I’ve been using them to simply organize groups of folders on a drive. I find it’s a little too labor intensive to tag every single file – although I wouldn’t put it past myself to do it!
Here’s a screenshot of one of my main edit drives. It’s still early days, so this all might change. But, basically, it’s organized by type of media folder (FCP7, X, Premiere) and then by Client Name. It’s so nice to be able to organize this way (although it actually would have been possible to do this in 10.7 with labels).
From what I can tell, tags are essentially labels on steroids. They react the same way, it’s just that you can add more than one per file or folder. And the search for those files is instantaneous as I’m sure you’ve discovered.
I’ve also added a keyboard shortcut to add a keyword to files/folders on the finder level to CTRL-K. Works really fast, just like in X. :-). And yes, I can definitely see these features being incorporated. Right now, when you save files in Mavs in TextEdit, the save dialogue pops up with a field to add a tag. So, it’s definitely a system-wide sort of thing.
There are many exciting ways tags can be implements. But it does add an extra layer of work and also troubleshooting/discovery/development. I’m all in for tags.
Michael Garber
5th Wall – a post production company
Blog: GARBERSHOP
My Moviola Webinar on Cutting News in FCP X -
Thanks for posting this!
I think, as I’m parsing this, that tags will be useful, but that colors will just stay colors even though they are now tags. Too many people will have too many uses for the colors, so I think they will remain–for me–“hey, notice this!” the tags, though–logging all elements to a job so that if they move beyond folders they can still be traced to a particular show?! That’s great.
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