File naming advanced tutorial: Leveraging lists
- Noah Chamow
Global Lists and Local lists are some of the most useful tools available in the naming UI. They give the operator a way to keep up with changing conditions on set, producers a low-effort metadata entry capability and simplify the lives of Loggers, AEs and Editors.
Properly wielded, lists can reduce the time to change filenames on ALL ISOs to 100% reflect the current state of the shoot.
For instance in the Sesame Street-style multicam example, without the lists, a logger is responsible for tracking which muppets, cast members and guests are in each shot of each setup, then correlating a generic file name with the correct shot and providing a list to an AE to bring into the timeline. Having done this ourselves, we know how fraught that situation becomes on a single camera, one day shoot, let alone across 14 ISOs during a season of Top Chef.
The key is to think about which data is changing and which is static in the shoot. If there are only two actors and they are in every shot, it’s probably not worth adding to the complexity or length of the file name.
If you are dealing with a changing rota of characters however, lists suddenly become powerful.
To look at just the Muppets portion of the lists from the previous chapter, we have four devoted to all the Muppets who might appear together in a shot. It’s possible that there could be a shot with more than four, but it’s unlikely to focus on more than four.
So for this scene we have Little Bird, Big Bird, Snuffy and Cookie Monster.
In four clicks I can change the entire content of the file name to reflect the next scene where we have only Elmo, Abby and Bert. List 3 is set to “empty” because we only have 3 muppets in this scene.
