An important part of our general workflow is keeping track of all the VFX work. Each shot goes through multiple iterations, gets worked on by different parties or is being used in multiple videos, especially with larger projects.
To guide this we use Notion to keep track of the shots. Every Notion Project Template has the same standard elements that we almost always use. Of course every project is different and we should therefore also be flexible and adjust accordingly. However, it is good practice that we all work in a similar way, given how many people can work on a project at the same time.
Once an edit has been locked it is the job of the editor/media manager to start prepping the shot for the online phase. Every shot that needs some sort of VFX will be prepped and each and everyone of these shots need to be included in the vfx list.
As mentioned in the VFX prep wiki [link] we ought to make a difference between external shots and comp shots. External shots are basically any shot that will be worked on/used outside Wenneker, so think of clean ups. Comp shots are all the shots we work on inside Wenneker (and for which we have project files).
To make things even more complicated, some shots we do send out to external parties but we only get tracks of mattes back. And some comp shots also require an external shot.
Lets start from the beginning. Once you’ve prepared your placeholder EXT and COMP shots we need to get all the names in the notion VFX overview. You can either manually add all the shot names or with a little trick, add all the names in one go.
First open TextEdit, go to Format and click Make Plain Text (CMD + SHIFT + T). Select all your shots (EXT + COMP), press CMD + C and then CMD + V while in the TextEdit document. All the video files have now been pasted as plain text into the document. Press CMD + F in order to remove unnecessary naming like .mov and _EXT. We only want to keep the clipname.
Copy all the video file names into the document.
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Remove unnecessary info.
Next we need to paste our list first into a google sheet document. Pasting directly from the plain text document into notion will result in all the names being put in a single cell. So, copy the clipnames, paste them into the Google sheets document. You’ll see that all names all have their own cell.
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Press CMD + A to select everything, then CMD + C. Then navigate to your notion VFX overview. Select the first two cells and now every single filename has been pasted into its own cell.
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Now that we have all the shots we can organize them. The way Notion works is with a database. We’ve added all the files, so now we can organise them using so-called properties. We can add, hide or show these, depending on what the project needs. In our vfx overview template we have the most commonly used properties already added. It is up to you to add or hide what you need, depending on the project.