When working with a ton of footage, culling them down and selecting just the part of them that you need can take quite a while. There a few methods to make it faster and easier, and one of them is called Pancake timelines. In this video, Justin Odisho explains to us how it works. If you are video editor with working tight deadlines or one looking for a way to speed things up, this tutorial is definitely made for you.
Pancake timelines are an easy way of selecting only the clips that you want to use. Instead of having to go through each clip using the preview window, you use two timelines and drag and drop the one you want to keep.
It’s not incredibly complicated to set up your workspace and start using this technique. The first thing you have to do is load all your clips in your project and then add them to your timeline. It’ll probably make an overly long timeline, but it doesn’t matter for now. The trick then is to create a second timeline and then stacking it underneath. Odisho shows this in Adobe Premiere, however it should be possible to do the same in other software as long as the interface is customizable enough. I wish it was also available in DaVinci Resolve 12.5 or 14, but unfortunately it’s currently not.
What do you think of this technique? Is it something that you use in your workflow or do you still rely on bins or other methods? Be sure to share your preferred techniques to speed your video editing up in the comments below.
This is great! One of those "how did I not think of this before" techniques. Much better than having to go through a damn bin one by one!
I like this idea as an alternative that may work on certain projects as an alternative to how I normally work. This is actually similar in concept. One thing I always keep in mind is that editing is not the process of adding footage to a project or timeline, it's the process of removing footage from everything that you've shot. I always add every single shot to a timeline as he has done and then begin using the ripple delete function and just start taking out the bad stuff. This has improved my editing times tenfold. I rarely use the source window.
This still seems like an extra step to me because I still need to trim footage in the lower timeline but I can imagine scenarios where it could be helpful. Thanks for sharing.