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Keeping track of editing time
I am an editor and my company requires me to keep track of the time spend per edit. I am working on 2 or more projects at a time and this causes a problem for me (seeing that I am not very good at admin!)
I would like to know if there is a way to “track” my time spend editing in Final Cut Pro (per project or better yet per sequence). For example: I need to tell them project x I spend 4 hours on day ______ and I spend 90 hours on the project for January. Is there a way to do this automatically without writing every second down? -
8 Replies
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We have a very simple project timesheet I developed here that you just keep a time track of “Start” “Stop” for everything you do during the day. We’re going to be moving over to a nice simple Filemaker Pro database that we’ll be able to keep open on the FCP systems very shortly, but in the meantime, this sheet has worked really well for 8 years.
Just create an MS Word document with four columns and as many rows as you can fit on a sheet of paper. Use one sheet per project to make it easier to keep track of each project’s hours.
Left column: Description. What did you do. Edit, graphics, animation, etc….
Columns 2 and 3: Start / Stop. Start time and Stop Time for each bit of work you do.
Last column: Hours. I round everything to the quarter hour.
When you’re done with the project you simple total up the Hours column.
As for a way of keeping track in FCP. Don’t know of one. Might be a plug in or app out there somewhere, but it’s so easy to just write it down I’ve never had the need.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Time equals money is a slick little application from Stone Software if you need more precision. They have quite a few useful gems in their suite of programs:
https://www.stone.com/pr/nyc/TimeEqualMoney_2_Ships.html
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[Steven Gonzales] “https://www.stone.com/pr/nyc/TimeEqualMoney_2_Ships.html”
Does this still work? Are you using this?
The Press Release is from 2002. Can’t find any specs to know if it still works correctly with Leopard.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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I’m not tracking time precisely, so I’m not using it now, but I demoed it a while back after chatting with the developer at Macworld.
Here’s the download link:
https://homepage.mac.com/stone_design/.Public/TimeEqualsMoney-2008-08-08.dmg
The build for this is Aug 2008, and it seems to work fine with Leopard upon a quick check.
I tagged the press release of 2002, because it was the most descriptive overview I found quickly.
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Thanks a mill. I just finished manual labor!! I did the 4 column sheets you suggested (the last 3 months!). Thanks for the app. Will check it out.
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I use Timeslice, which I find very useful and easy to use.
Tom Valens
Tamalpais Productions -
Years ago I built a relational FMPro database to keep track of everything; jobs, notes, job details, client info, reporting- it’s very complex, has dozens of screens crazy reporting functionality, multi-level security & screen access. Not pretty to look at, sadly.
What we found out fairly quickly is that it wasn’t a great idea to give our editors & mixers even simple record-level access to the database. They’re too busy doing their jobs to move between screens. But we finally cut off access when we realized that the system could be used to – how to say – “massage” the data, for a variety of reasons. So we kept the database but put a small piece of software on all the workstations that was a simple timeclock. It had job name, client, specific task descriptions and a simple way of punching in & out on a given task. Our personnel were happier with it, and while it was still prone to bad data entry, we noticed that they tended not to engage in data massage. I never understood the psychology there. A few times a day, our facilities manager would pull a report from the clock and transcribe the date into the FMPro database for detailed reporting & job tracking.
Bottom line: If you build a proper database, you need to keep the data as pure as possible & make its interface simple to navigate for your users.
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I’ll second TimeSlice, https://www.timeslice.us/mac/TS4/index.html
It’s got the ability to group projects, clients, whatever. And you can even set it up so that it only records time spent in a specific application. I’ve got it setup now so that when FCP is the foreground app, it will record time, and when I switch to another app (checking email, websites, etc..) it will pause time and then start again automatically when returning to FCP. That takes setting up, but it’s very flexible and has a comprehensive reporting system. You can export which projects to include in the report, and it exports as tab-delimited.
You can just have manual start/stop editing as well. One thing that based on some of the comments, it does let you edit start/stop times. I started editing today when I got off the phone, forgot to start the timer, and about 30 minutes in check the time of my phone call, and set my start time to that and continued editing and recording my accurate time.
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