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[thuviaptarth]

serrico asked: Do you use any tools, like clip notes or storyboards?

The short answer is: I use an outline, markers, markers with notes, sometimes title cards with notes, themed sequences, and a time-tracking spreadsheet.

I used to completely misunderstand the meaning of "storyboard"; I am not visual enough to use them.

The long answer is:

• Outline
  I usually start off by creating a vid outline: a table with three columns (timestamp, lyrics/musical description, and clips/themes) and a row for each distinct musical segment (usually intro, verses, choruses, bridge, and outro). It's a working document: I strike out clips when I've added them to the timeline and update the clips/themes section when I get new ideas or old ideas don't work, at least until I get too swept up into the editing or revising to bother. When I'm working on a draft, I usually color sections in green when I feel they're pretty final (I may be wrong about this), yellow when they're partially done, and pink to indicate that whatever's on the timeline is wrong and I need to come up with something else.
  
  
  
  
  I use the same document, outside the table, to capture miscellaneous notes -- concepts I want to try that aren't attached to a particular timestamp or section yet, clips I like but don't have a place for. Sometimes I use it for episode notes, but more often I take episode notes by hand in a notebook.
  
  
• Lyrics and music markers
  I used to mark the timeline for each new line and major musical changes, but for my last vid I realized I could just do a dedicated subtitle track for the lyrics. I still mark important musical moments, sometimes just with a time marker, and sometimes with a note describing the sound or what I want to put there.
  
  
• Scrap tracks and sequences
  I usually have 2-3 invisible tracks where I put clips I like but don't have a good idea for yet, or possible alternates for what's currently visible. When the tracks get too crowded, I move the clips to a general "scrap" sequence. If I'm collecting clips on a particular theme or character, I'll create an individual scrap sequence dedicated to that.
  
  
  
  
  
• Color labels
  In my last vid, I started playing around with label colors as an identifier -- green for nested sequences, light blue for clean 1080p footage, dark blue for 1080p footage with hardsubs, yellow for 720p footage. (I started off with clean 1080p footage for most of the episodes and clean 720p for about ten of them. I later found hardsubbed 1080p footage for those episodes and replaced the 720p footage with either dialogueless hardsubbed footage or composites of the hardsubbed 1080p + 720p footage with the subtitles masked out. The yellow labels made it easy to see what needed to be replaced at any time.)
  
  I got the suggestion from a post by
  lim, who used different label colors to represent different seasons of a show, which is probably more widely applicable.
  
  
  
  
  
• Spreadsheets
  I use a spreadsheet with a page for each vid to track how much time I've spent editing (date, minutes spent, total number of minutes). I find it very encouraging for some reason.

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