Israeli film-maker Yuval Orr has edited dozens of documentaries, features and shorts, including the Oscar-winning short Skin. One of his favourite tricks is to use Shot Notes X to annotate and organise his clips in Final Cut Pro X.
“I often edit from my place in Israel, even if the film is shot in the US,” says Orr. “Shot Notes X lets me pull all the notes from the director, sound crew and others into Final Cut Pro. I’ll have the metadata, like scene, shot, lens, director favourite, continuity and more. It helps me understand what happened on set from 7,540 miles away.”
Having all this info coupled with your video clips also means you can search within Final Cut Pro to quickly find a particular clip or organise related clips.
Shot Notes X in action
The easiest way to work with Shot Notes X is to keep notes in a spreadsheet; the developer provides a template you can open in Numbers or Microsoft Excel.
Here, you or anyone else on crew can add details about each shot during production. When you’ve wrapped, export those notes to a comma-separated-values (CSV) file.
Then, in Final Cut Pro, import your footage, select the relevant events and choose File > Export XML to create a file with a list of your video clips.
Finally, launch Shot Notes X and import both the XML and the CSV files. The app uses timecodes and other metadata to automatically match your notes with the appropriate clips.
Save the resulting XML file and import it back into Final Cut Pro (File > Import > XML); your notes are added to each clip as metadata that you can use to search and organise.