From the course: After Effects Guru: Color Grading Footage

Strategies to improve file naming and timecode - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Color Grading Footage

Start my 1-month free trial

Strategies to improve file naming and timecode

“

- Once you have your media brought in, you're going to want to keep track of things like clip names and time code. This will make it a lot easier when you have to go back to the non-linear editing tool. If you want to hand the material back off to an editor or someone else who's working in the pipeline, it's a good idea to keep things simple. In After Effects there are a couple of useful options that are going to make this a lot easier. In After Effects, there's a coupla options that are really useful. First up, if you select a series of clips and right-click, you could choose new comp from selection. This will bring up a new dialogue. You can make sure that multiple compositions is checked and what this will do is make a comp for each of the selected items. When I click okay, you'll notice that they automatically take on the name of each item. Additionally, if you open up one of these items, you'll see that it doesn't start at zero zero. Well let's expand this panel here for a moment and I want to show you something important. With a piece of footage selected, you can right-click on the top header here and bring up columns for media start. You'll see in this case, the actual starting time code for the file and you'll notice that the starting time code of the clip, by default, matches the starting time code for the sequence. Doing this will make things a lot easier. Now if for some reason these values aren't syncing up, you can always take a look at the composition settings here and this is where you can check things. Notice you can enter in a starting time code, if needed, and change the name for the composition. But I like to encourage you that these values should match. The new file that's generated will have the same name and the output time code of the original.

Contents