FEATURE REQUEST – Folders / Bins at the sequence level

[Juan Salvo]

Can I ask, how many sequences do you typically have? I don’t think I’ve had more than like 7 or 8 in a project, and usually a couple of those are duplicates that I could have deleted. Most projects have two sequences at the most.

https://JuanSalvo.com
https://theColourSpace.com

[Oyvind Stiauren]

How many sequences you’ll have will of course depend on what type of projects you have. I mostly do DI for feature films and for those projects I usually will have 4-6 sequences, 1 for each 2000 ft reel. But when doing color correcting for restoration of old feature films, each reel will be only 1000 ft, and therefore I’ll usually end up having anywhere between 8-13 sequences. So I can see that in some cases you can end up with quite a few sequences to manage, but in most cases I think the way things work right now in Resolve is adequate.

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Oyvind Stiauren
Post production supervisor, Colorist
Terminal

Mexico City

[Nat Jencks]

I work on features so I usually have 5 or 6 reels. It’s not uncommon for a reel or two to have recuts after the preliminary turnover at which point we reconform, but I like to keep the old sequences for reference. So it’s not uncommon for me to have 10 sequences. I would like to be able to create a folder called “old reels” or “archive” etc. Best-
-Nat

[Marc Wielage]

[Nat Jencks] “Its great that you can add folders (bins) in the media pool, but what would be even better would be to be able to add folders to organize your sequences.”
You mean the timelines? I just give the timelines in a feature different names to differentiate any versions over a period of weeks, then sort them by name.

One bug from V9: if you cycle through the timelines with the dedicated key on the DaVinci Resolve panel, you can’t set the order of the timelines beyond creation order. I would much rather this order just parallel the order of the timelines alphabetically. I’m glad that they did at least provide the “duplicate timeline” function in V10, which is very helpful.

[Margus Voll]

in v10 it should be relatively easy to organise stuff even on one timeline.

i mean flags and markers.

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Margus

https://iconstudios.eu
https://vimeo.com/iconstudioseu/videos

DaVinci 9, OSX 10.7.4
MacPro 5.1 2×2,93 24GB
GTX 470 / Quadro 4000
Multibridge 2 Pro

[Marc Wielage]

[Margus Voll] “in v10 it should be relatively easy to organise stuff even on one timeline.”
I think Nat is talking about multiple timelines, assuming that’s what he means by “sequences.”

I agree, flags and markers can be very useful — I use flags just to indicate specific shots the DP has approved, so I can then use those as hero shots to complete the rest of the scene. But if you have multiple cuts and massive changes but want to keep the original cut “just in case,” you can wind up with a couple of dozen timelines very quickly for a single feature. I can recall working with one director some years back on Pogle (anybody remember that?) where I think we had 7 or 8 versions of each reel, and he occasionally wanted to use last Tuesday’s look for one series of shots with this Friday’s new edit of the same scene, using a whole different approach. Not fun to mix and match, but we got it done.

[Margus Voll]

Ok i see the point.

I have been lucky with features that i have locked edits usually.

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Margus

https://iconstudios.eu
https://vimeo.com/iconstudioseu/videos

DaVinci 9, OSX 10.7.4
MacPro 5.1 2×2,93 24GB
GTX 470 / Quadro 4000
Multibridge 2 Pro

[Juan Salvo]

I always keep reels in separate projects. It’s tough to divide and conquer if all the reels are in the same project.

https://JuanSalvo.com
https://theColourSpace.com

[Nat Jencks]

Even when everything is truly locked, its nice to be able to dupe a timeline before you make a major change to a particular scene etc. Or occasionally I might have an assistant work on some scenes, and I like to duplicate the timeline before they start working on it.

I realize that the traditional workflow for resolve is to keep the number of timelines in a single project very low, or even at a single timeline per project, but I really don’t think that makes sense looking forward.

As resolve takes steps towards having some basic functionality as an online editor these type of things become more crucial.

The organizational benefits of being able group timelines and place them in folders seem obvious to me. I also use Scratch quite a bit, and the same conversation came up a few years ago as more users started using it for long form work and the need for folders to organize timelines (constructs in scratch) came up. When scratch added the ability to place timelines in folders (groups) to organize them it was a huge benefit organizationally for me.

Best-
-Nat

[Brandon Thomas]

For features, I can see there not being a big need, but when doing spots, I’ve had projects with 20+ sequences. :60, :30s, :15s, :10s, + Agency versions, Director’s cuts, etc..

The ability to have folders there would certainly be helpful. Even if it’s just another way to be OCD or keep myself organized.