Aaargh I have way too much footage to sort through, and still I know stuff is missing.
I’m losing track of all this stuff!
I haven’t even started sampling yet… I know that once I get stuff into the computer, it will be a lot easier for me to edit, since that is just the way my brain works (and sort of the reason I am so into film). However sampling every bit of footage into the machine is totally out of the question! I have to whittle it down a bit first!
- OPTION ONE: Notebook keeping a physical set of notes is what I started doing.
It’s good to have an actual phyiscal page associated with a given tape. However now that I have a bunch of tapes annotated, and not all are in order, it is getting a little confusing. Also, there is no fast way to shuffle the entries or sort them by topic.
- OPTION TWO: Excel I absolutely need to sort by topic. How about in Excel? The rows heights are a little distracting- I”m going to have to resize each one to display the notes I write! Also I’ll have to turn on text wrapping for the descriptions, because otherwise the notes will flow into the next cell. It’s very tempting to write a “quick” PHP server application for this, backed by MySQL, but we have to stay focussed here…
- OPTION THREE: Plain text (TextEdit) this eliminates some of the insanity of using Excel. However my sorting problems aren’t much better than the plain notebook. Although I would be able to search the documents…
- OPTION FOUR: HTML text would let me link all the documents together. Hmmm. But then I have to write HTML pages for every entry! More infrastructure. And we get the server problem again.
Okay, I think I have a process going now. It’s sort of a little of everything.
First I watch the tapes and take notes in the notebook and/or the laptop. The notebook is capable of greater detail, and is physical- if the notes are only on the laptop, I print them out.
I summarize the shots I think are important in Excel, using some keywords so I can easily search for shots.
When these entries are converted to Excel, I copy the rows for a given tape into its own file, for later reference., and so I can easily double click on a file and see what was in the tape.