Being asked to help out with any project gives us an opportunity to learn and enhance that what we already know as well as help uncover a way for refinement in our approach and process. I personally think this is the way to move forward and avoid stagnation as a creative.
Here’s a real recent world example; Walker and I were asked to help edit a video for the daughter of Wiñay Taki’s founding member Rene Franco Salas. We happily jumped in and approached the project with the thought that we were going to be working through the day and trying to put a video together like we normally would. We were surprised to find out that his daughter (and her 2 classmates) had already shot all the footage and even had a rough shot list (with timecodes!) in place. Which left Walker and myself available to focus strictly on the timeline, titles, images and the lot.
Her and her group’s organization was a complete surprise (and a separate blog post) but also gave way for me to identify a need and refinement for us as a team. I spoke with Walker and discussed the option of being able to streamline the process for EVERY video project that we produce as we move ahead. That was synthesized into something like this:
Wouldn’t it be great if we could…
Create a rough-cut video from our footage as soon as we imported it into our computer – with clip name and timecode (per clip) burned into the rough-cut so that we could immediately review the collected footage and take our notes for our in and out points.
Paramount to the creation of said rough-cut, it would have to be something that wouldn’t have to be re-encoded = time saver. In a perfect world, it would be near instantaneous.
Automate this process so that we could launch this from a script (or via Alfred) so that we could simply run it without ever having to open another application.
I wanted to remove, as much as possible, any heavy mental gymnastics this could potentially involve. Thoughtless would be the direction I was looking for.
Why would this be great you ask?
The premise is that it would allow you to watch the collected footage (together) in one video and note the clip and timecodes in order to specify the in and out points before you ever open an NLE (non-linear editor) like Premiere Pro for example. It would also allow you to get a feel for the footage you have taken and open a dialog for the flow of the material. As a bonus, if you are location and shooting the material, you could conceivably show the rough-cut to the people you have been filming (e.g. interviews) so they could see, in context, the whole of the storyline and gain a better visual representation instead of just abstract ideas.
Basically, the more prepared you are for any video project the better and if you can do more without using the NLE as a tool to do it, you can therefore spend more time in the NLE for what it does best; assemble footage and fine tune your story.

Huh, interesting. But can this be done?
Yup. Done. Inspired from our video editing marathon with the group, I am happy to release the beta version of my new Alfred workflow. Once you have imported your footage into your computer, you simply select the parent folder that holds your raw video and call the workflow, it creates a rough-cut video (instantly) based sequentially from the files that reside inside the directory. So for example, let’s look at this mock directory (folder) structure:
rough-cut/
├── camera-a
│ ├── 1-IMG_2209.MOV
│ ├── 2-IMG_2210.MOV
│ ├── 3-IMG_2211.MOV
│ ├── 4-IMG_2213.MOV
│ └── 5-IMG_2214.MOV
└── camera-b
└── IMG_2208.MOV
In this example we have a main directory (folder) titled rough-cut which in turn holds two sub- directories for each camera; camera-a, and camera-b. Inside camera-a we have our master footage, all 1920×1080 HD footage. If I wanted to assemble this footage as a quick rough-cut, I would run the workflow on the camera-a directory, visually shown in the following 44 second video:
And there you have it; ready to preview (with timecode and clip title), take notes, and get busy in the timeline.
Do that dance.
