Zack Arnold

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Behind the Empire Editorial Workflow

About Episode

In this episode I do a deep dive with my assistant Natalie Boschan into every vital step of our editorial workflow at Empire from day one until delivery of a locked episode. We discuss in detail the systems we’ve developed to become a more efficient and productive team over the years. Although we use Avid at Empire, the organizational systems and templates we’ve created can be applied to any NLE workflow in scripted, reality, documentary, or otherwise.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: So today’s going to be a little bit of a different episode. It may sound a little bit different than usual, and that’s because I am not with my guest via Skype. I am actually standing in the edit bay of my assistant editor, Natalie Boschan. So welcome, Natalie. Hi. I almost called her Natalie Baker because that’s her maiden name, and she recently got married, and I still have a tendency to call her Baker. So it may slip out. We’ll see what happens. I call her my assistant, but I would say the proper term is probably consigliere more than assistant. She’s my partner in crime on Fitness and Post, and she is my left and right hand on Empire. So I really think we need to come up with a new term, assistant, because I know a lot of people that work with people that are assistants that are much more than that. So I don’t like the term, but technically, Natalie’s my assistant. So I’m here in my assistant editor’s bay, and what I want to do today is a really deep technical dive into what Natalie and I do when we jump into a new show, whether it’s a new season on a show, whether it’s a pilot, whether it’s a feature. Where do you start from ground one, and what can you do to set yourself up so you are as efficient as possible, so you have a really solid workflow, so you’re minimizing the amount of time that you’re dealing with trying to find stuff, being disorganized, there being problems, and you’re really spending as much time as possible just being creative and not having bad habits and developing good habits from day one, because it’s very hard to undo bad habits when you’re in the middle of a show, in the middle of a season. You’ve got bullets flying everywhere. You’ve got deadlines to meet. You’re not all of a sudden going to change your workflow, but on most jobs, you will have a day or two where things are really slow. You haven’t got material yet. You can just kind of get yourself set up, and what we want to do is talk about some of the things that we do to get ourselves set up. And I want to make it very clear: this is not the way to do it. This is our way of doing it. So if we’re offering some good suggestions, and you’re saying, “Oh, I’d like to implement that, that’s the whole point of this. But I’m not saying this is the way that everybody should be doing it because everybody has their own workflow. But if you walk away from today’s episode with a couple of new tips or ways that you can make your life a little bit easier than we have done our jobs. So Natalie, we are standing here in your edit bay. Yes. I’m looking at monitors that are very low because Natalie’s very short compared to me. So I’m going to be going to be squatting the whole time to look at your monitors. It’s good for you. It is. It’s good for me. I’ll just be in horse stance for the whole hour. Yep. We actually do horse stands breaks at the office in the afternoon. Plank and horse stance breaks

Natalie Boschan: And wall sits

Zack Arnold: And wall sits. Yes. And dips. We have a lot, lot of fun stuff that we do here over at Empire. All right. So we’ve just walked into your bay. It’s the morning of day one. We don’t have dailies yet. Let’s talk about some of the things that we do. So where’s the first place that we will usually start and get ourselves set up.

Natalie Boschan: Well, I always set up the the drive first, the media drive and the render drive. We use an ISIS, so if you’re using a Unity or an ISIS, you set up the drive. I guess if you’re using Premiere, Final Cut Pro, you’d set up your folder structure to point your media to somewhere organized and easy to find, so I set up the drives. The drives that I set up are sound effects, stock footage, music, and elements drives. Let’s make sure I got all of those.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. So we’re literally standing at her computer right now, looking at all her different windows. So we may have little little moments of pause here where we’re actually looking at stuff.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah. So that’s so stock footage, sound effects, music, and elements. Elements being graphics, main title, just stuff that every editor needs to use in most shows. So that’s our elements. Stock footage is obviously stock footage that you download from any sort of stock footage site, or that you’re given from whoever gives you your stock footage. What we also do is take production stock footage and consolidate that over to our stock footage drive, so that it stays with the show in perpetuity. Because we definitely use some production stock footage from season one that we’re also using in season two. Music is really important on our show. It’s a music. It’s a music show. Yes, occasionally, once

Zack Arnold: In a while, we do have music on Empire. Yeah, probably not a news flash.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, so that drive is really big, and and all of our music, even our production music, goes on the music drive because we use it. We use stems and tracks sometimes in different episodes, so keeping music separate is a good idea. We also have an imports drive, which I love, and I haven’t seen on a lot of shows. But our imports drive is basically where we keep. And okay, if you’re not working in Avid, it’s not really something you need. But in Avid, since you make MXF files, you don’t need your originals technically, but it doesn’t. It makes me uncomfortable coming from a Final Cut workflow. That’s how I came about. Was in final was in the days of Final Cut Seven. So deleting original media always scares me. I know sometimes people do that because they don’t need it. They use the MXFs, but I hate deleting the originals. So we have an imports drive where. We keep all of our originals, then we don’t have to keep it on our hard drives. So I really love that drive. And then every episode has its own media drive and its own render drive.

Zack Arnold: And what is the theory behind splitting up the media and the render drives? I actually this is something I had not thought of in the past, but I like the reason that we did

Natalie Boschan: It. Well, we usually divide it up so that we can keep our media and our renders separate. A lot of people have a lot of renders. We actually do not use a lot of renders as a team. I’m not sure why that is, but we actually the two of us don’t use the render drive.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I almost never use it.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, we. I mean, like your bay is set for you know for all your renders to go there, but we barely use the space on the render drive. But it is a really good idea to keep your renders separate, so that if you ever need to find your MXFs, you can find it really easily without sifting through renders. And if you ever need to delete your renders, you can delete those very easily without having to worry about deleting your media.

Zack Arnold: One thing I want to mention before going further is that, as she mentioned, we are on Avid, but all the things we’re talking about tonight are more theoretical ideas. Not here’s an Avid workflow. It’s more here’s what we do, but this can very easily be applied in 95% of the cases to any NLE, to any hard drive structure. Whether you have a Unity, an ISIS, a Facilis, you’re doing the sneaker network flow, and you have a bunch of G-RAID drives. It really doesn’t matter. It’s all about the concept of how we organize. And yes, the system is different if you’re on an Avid Unity or an ISIS because MXF media works very differently than having raw media. But for years, when I had a Final Cut post production facility, we always had a template folder structure that we used for every single project, I would create a partition per project, and then we would also have partitions for individual people. Like I had five or six edit workstations, and each one of those would have their own partition for renders for random miscellaneous stuff. But then each project had a partition, and there were always folders to separate music, effects, stock footage, raw media, anything that you would think that’s in its own category, you always want to separate it. And I love how the ISIS is doing that, as opposed to I’ve been on shows before where I just came in and cut, and I wasn’t part of the workflow process where it’s just partition A, partition B, partition C through M, and you’re thinking I can’t find anything. But if I know that I’m looking for raw media for episode 209. I know exactly where to look for it. I drag and drop, and I’m done. And that saves us time during the day, which is the whole point of the show: is talking about how can you save time that you don’t need to be spending, so you can either number one put it into your show and be more creative, or number two get the hell out of the office and get home and have a life. Those are the two reasons that we’re trying to develop these systems so we can do one of those two things. So go go ahead.

Natalie Boschan: Oh, my second favorite drive, maybe my first favorite drive after since we did this this summer, since we were first on on Underground, which was

Zack Arnold: That was a pilot that we did during hiatus. If anybody’s wondering, yes,

Natalie Boschan: We created this beautiful sound effects drive. That it was great. So I know a lot of people use the workflow where they have all of their master sound effects on a drive, and whenever you need to go find a sound effect, you go and look for it on the Finder level, or use Easy Find, find that sound effect, import it into Avid. That is not a workflow that’s for me or Zack. But what we did was we imported all of the sound effects from our various libraries, and instead of having it in just one big bulk drive, like one just big sound like Avid Media Files MXF plus all of your like 1000s and 1000s of sound effects. We divided it up into the different folders. So, so in Avid you don’t have to continuously label all of your folders with a number once your databases are built. So what I did was I took say Hollywood Edge. We’ve got our Hollywood Edge Premier Edition Library. I want to put all of the Hollywood. I want to take all of my Hollywood Edge sound effects and put them in one folder, separated out from the rest of my sound effects. So what I did was I, you know, labeled. You know, it was called well whatever Z Assistant One, that’s what it’s called in the Unity. But you put that you you bring in all of your MXFs, let the database build. Once that database is built, you change that folder name to Hollywood Edge Premier Edition. Now I need to go ahead and bring in my Sound Ideas Library. I bring that all into into one folder, and then I also put those all into one bin because both Zack and I like to use the structure where we have everything in a bin, and then we can use custom sift as opposed to having a lot of things divided up into different bins. So we took all of our sound effects and put them into. One specific bin, so we had all of our sound ideas in one bin, so we could custom sift. Because I hate using the find function on Avid. I hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it. If

Zack Arnold: Anybody listening to this works for Avid, fix your find function.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, I hate the find function, and yes, my bins are indexed. So yes, I hate the find function. So I love using custom sifts. So we put all of the sound effects in as little bins as possible. I had my Hollywood Edge, and then you know Underground took place during the Civil War. So we brought in our historical series. We brought in so we had a whole bin of just sort of you know Civil War era type sound effects, horse and buggy type of effects. So that was just great. And so now we can carry with us this sound effects library that’s divided up into every different sound effect library in a nice, organized, neat folder structure. And it’s not just folder MXF, like 1000s and 1000s of MXF. It’s it’s MXF sound ideas one, sound ideas too. Hollywood Edge, Hollywood Edge historical series, et cetera, et cetera, and that has been that has been amazing. I love that sound effects library. We don’t have it here on Empire because we it was we used it.

Zack Arnold: Yes, we we inherited the the structure of the sound effects library, and because we used it all of season one and was used on the pilot, we are just using what’s already established here, but if you haven’t learned already, I have met my match in the world of OCD organization. So we complement each other well in that sense, and we’ll spend all day just making sure that everything is capitalized properly on our Trello boards. We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that in a little bit. Okay, so we’ve kind of covered the basic idea of where to start, which is making sure your raw media or your MXF media is organized. This is a foundation of being efficient, no matter what platform you’re on, whether it’s Final Cut Seven, Final Cut 10, Adobe Premiere, Lightworks. It doesn’t matter if your media is not managed and organized properly. You are going to run into issues. You’re going to make mistakes, and it is going to cost you either time or money or both. So now, what I want to do is get into Avid because this is kind of the heartbeat of everything that we do for 12 hours a day is working in Avid. But again, I really want to talk about it from a theoretical level where we’re not limiting this to people that use Avid. This can be done for anybody. And yes, the way that bins work in Avid is, of course, a little bit different than the way that libraries work in Final Cut 10 or the way that folders and bins work in Adobe Premiere. So I understand there’s a little bit of difference, but we’re going to try as much as possible to just stay theoretical and not talk specifically about Avid. So the first thing that I really want to mention that is so super important to me, and I actually briefly mentioned this concept in a previous podcast I did with Maxim Jago. I believe it was episode 40-seven, and I’ll leave a link in the show notes. But I’m very, very particular about the order of folders, partly because I’m OCD, but also there’s there’s a method to my madness where I don’t want to have to think about or look for folders or look for bins, and I want to use muscle memory, and the muscle memory being my hands and my eyes, knowing that when I move my Waycom pen to a certain place on the screen, the folder I want is just there. So the way that we do that is we make sure that we always have all of our bins, or this would also be your your folders or bins in Premiere or somewhere else, we have a master structure of folders in our project. There’s nothing that drives the two of us more bat insane than a bunch of random bins at the top of a project because then you can never find anything. So,

Natalie Boschan: And what I do for these folder structures is I set up a template so that every single I don’t have to continuously copy each one individually. Like, what was the cutsban? Oh, the cutsb bin, and now the scenes, the cutbin, and now this and or folder. I have a template, so I can just copy and paste. I have a an empty template, a folder, so I can just copy and paste this folder structure into every single project we do. And we’ll I’ll go on about templates later.

Zack Arnold: So that’s a definitely a time saver. And yes, we’re going to talk a lot about templates and also the concept of using checklists and how that can alleviate a lot of stress from your mind. Or we’re going to go through the checklists that we use and how we build them and how we stick to them. But as far as the folder structure, I’m literally looking at our folder structure right now. And basically, what we do is we put numbers in front of the folder, so we alphabetize them properly. Which means that I’m using muscle memory to find it, and I’m not having to think. I’m not having to go. Oh, where’s the music folder? Where’s the visual effects folder? So what we do is we, at the very top, I have a folder that’s called transfer bins, and this is an idea that I learned from an assistant editor that’s now an editor that I worked with on burn notice, and it’s probably one of the best tips I’ve ever learned. Where especially in Avid, it’s very you can’t have two people opening a specific bin at once. But this will apply to anybody working in Premiere. It works in Final Cut Seven. I did it for years. I don’t know about Final Cut 10 because I don’t have a lot of experience with it. But you have a bin for each person on the project. So for the two of us, it’s just a transfer bin that says to Natalie and to Zack. And anytime we want to pass something to that person, I just send it to her. I say, hey, here’s a sequence to work on her. Here’s this or here’s that piece of media. We don’t say, oh, you have to look for it here. Anything she needs from me is going to be in her transfer bin, and vice versa. So that way I know if there are things that she and I are collaborating on, she doesn’t randomly have a bin open that I have access to. She’s doing the work. She tries to save it, realizes that she lost all of her work. She’s going to keep it in her bins. I have stuff in my bins, and when we’re moving it back and forth, we just have a transfer system. And this is so simple, but it is like the heartbeat of our entire workflow, and it saves so much time for us. So I’m eternally grateful to Brian Jonasson for showing me this system. I absolutely love

Natalie Boschan: It. Yeah, and an important part of this is not making a million copies of something because when if Zack needs to pass me a scene for whatever reason, he’ll. So we got at the top of the bin. I have scene seven right now. So if Zack needs to pass me scene seven, he does his work on scene seven. He puts it into my transfer bin to Natalie. I take that same sequence. I put it in a separate work bin that I have. I have a my own little work bin that I put all of my everything everywhere all the work that I do. I put that into my work bin. I work on that sequence. If for some reason I worry that I’m gonna like mess up his work, I make a copy, but I keep that copy somewhere else. That’s not i. I never give him that copy back. I only have it for reference, for if whatever I don’t know, I I remove like 18 seconds from a sequence or something, but I leave that copy just for reference. Then I do all my work on the seven on the scene seven sequence. I give him back the scene seven that same sequence that copy that I made. I now archive it and put it away somewhere else where no one else can see it, so that we don’t get confused as to like is this the real scenes of it? No, this one’s from last week. Well, this one was from you know three days after that. Like, no, you keep one sequence because otherwise it’s just going to be messy when you think about you know which one is this and which one is that. We had that problem with Final Cut where you look at a project and you’re like, is this project from you know may 20th or May 21st or whatever it is, but that’s another key: is to keep the same sequence each time, not make a million copies of it. The

Zack Arnold: Idea is again, we’re trying to eliminate as much error from the workflow as possible, so we’re not cutting the wrong sequence. So all of a sudden, we’re not outputting the wrong version of a show. So conceptually, what this means is there’s only one version of a sequence that ever exists, and when we make when we send it out to somebody, then it goes into an outputs bin, so we know that it exists. So yes, now we have multiple versions, but as we’re building a show, I have a sequence for each scene, and I cut that scene individually. I give her the sequence, which means it only exists in one place, which is now in her transfer bin or her work bin. So if I go into my main cuts bin and it’s not there, I know that that means she has access to it and I don’t. So this avoids any confusion about versioning, about who’s doing what, and this saves us a ton of time. And I can’t remember the last time that we had the wrong version of something somewhere, or we couldn’t find something, we’ve just eliminated that error from our workflow, which is actually a very very common error that I don’t even think about because we’ve eliminated that from our workflow. But the the next thing is going down our list. I’ll just kind of go through these pretty quickly. At the top, right under the transfer bins, I have our cuts bin, which is where we have every single bin for all of our various cuts. So when we start a new show, I just have an assemblies bin for all my scenes. Then I just iterate from there. So I have a bin, or it would be a folder in other in other NLEs, but it would just be editor’s cut, director’s cut. I will iterate those for director’s cut, work in progress. 123, whatever it is, goes to producers, goes to studio in the network. Goes to the studio and the network again. We just have a bin. Any time it goes out into the world and it’s not between us, it gets a new number on the bin. And this is a system that I set up so we could always track everything. So it would be 12345, But if we’re doing, for example, director’s cut, you’re going to have multiple outputs to a director. It’s not 12345, It would be one for editor’s cut, two for director’s cut, two A, 2b 2c 2d and so on. Because you’re iterating within the same general version. Then when you go to the producers, it’s three. Then when you go to the studio network, it’s four, and so on. And if you’re dealing with a feature film, and we’ve done plenty of features this way too, the iterations are just going to be a little different based on it’s still going to be editors cut, directors cut, producers cut, but maybe it’s test one or test two or whatever it is. But you’re just keeping track of your iterations, and the reason that we number them is we have the same numbering system in our. Output spin. So when we output something, we have a separate sequence that has that exact same number on it, because there’s nothing worse than going into somebody else’s project if you’re helping out or you’ve been hired onto another project. You’re like, oh yeah, well here are these notes you need to do, and they’re from this version. And you spend an hour saying, I have no idea where this version is. For us, we just look at the output. We know that it’s oh, it’s 4b So I just find my bin on my cuts bin that’s labeled 4b That’s where I need to start. So it’s really really easy to find everything. So from there, after the cuts bin, we just have our scenes bin, and we break up our scenes and scenes to cut, which is kind of a system of a checklist where when I have a bin for a scene, when Natalie will break down the dailies for a scene, she puts it in scenes to cut. That’s my to-do list, and then I will drag it into our scenes bin once it’s complete. And then once the editor’s cut is done, then the scenes to cut folder just disappears.

Zack Arnold: But that’s a really easy, quick visual way of just saying, “Geez, how many more scenes do we have to go before we’re done with a cut, and if you’re doing a feature film that has a 60-day or 90-day shoot and has 155 scenes, you probably want to break this down into days as well. But for an episode of TV, we’ll have 35 or 40 scenes, so it really doesn’t need to be managed that much. But this is just kind of a way for us to keep track of what we’re doing, and then from there, it’s just simple stuff: music, sound effects, stock footage, visual effects, voiceover, temp ADR tracks, the miscellaneous bin, and then we have a whole list of bins from here that are all the things that Natalie needs for assistant work, for doing turnovers, EDLs, outputs, all the random stuff that she’s going to have to do as well.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and in addition to our main project, project our main episode project, what we have on every show or every show that I’ve been on is an Elements project where we keep all of the stuff that needs to go to every editor. So every editor needs to access stock footage of the outside of Empire. Every editor needs to access all of the sound effects. Every editor needs some like the music that comes in because we get music from our we have our performance tracks and we have music from our composer from past episodes and we have music from our music supervisor. What we do with the Elements Project is basically I look at which bins are going to be updated a lot, and the bins that are going to be updated a lot are music bins because we constantly have that coming in. So we don’t. So I don’t keep the composer score in our separate music folder in our project. It lives in the elements project, and then Zack or I or any other editor will open it up from the Elements project, and it becomes a Unity bin. So they will open it up from that Elements project, and then however it gets update, whenever it gets updated, they always have the most updated bin, right? So if I need to put in music from our music supervisor. I don’t have to go around and tell all of the AEs, “Hey, I got more music, and you’re gonna have to update the bin and the project. All they have to do is just access it from the Elements project, and then it’s always updated. They always have the right bin, and they always have all of the music that they need. Same goes for composer music. Same goes for performance tracks, because, you know I’m not on all the emails that are coming in for episodes that aren’t mine, so I don’t know when we get all kinds of different sound effects or music or whatever comes in or visual effects that maybe we all need to use. But if we have it all in one bin and an elements project that we all can pull from, then you know that it’s always it’s always the most updated. You don’t have to continuously like copy it into your project and update it and keep track of that because that’s just time and brain power you don’t want to use. Yeah,

Zack Arnold: And so basically the way you want to think about it, if you’re not an avid, if you’re in any system, just ask yourself the question: If you’re in a shared environment where you’re not on an island doing this all by yourself and you’re doing multiple episodes, is this an element that I’m going to only use for the specific episode, like dailies or specific piece of music or score that you know is only for one episode, or is this something that I’m going to use in perpetuity for the entire show, not the episode? That’s something that goes in the Elements project. So, like she said, a perfect example is all of the score. We have the library of every score piece that’s ever been on the show in a score bin. But having that jest in our project doesn’t make sense because if it’s just going to be in our specific episode, it’s not going to get updated, and then all of a sudden you’re going to have different updated versions of score in every single person’s individual episodes, which becomes a nightmare, and I know this for a fact because I started doing this on burn notice because we had so many different score bins and music bins that I couldn’t find anything. So I said, “Hey, what if we just put everything in one master bin? We labeled it with the episode number, and we all shared the same bin. And from then on, we had no problems updating.” Everything was labeled. We had access to the same information, and there weren’t 10 different score bins because we had 10 different episodes at one time. So yeah, I’m glad you brought up the elements concept because that’s something that’s really, really super important. And you can do that on any NLE. Like if you were on Adobe Premiere, you would just have a separate project that you could access via your media browser, and you wouldn’t even have to open it. You would just have your media browser open to that project and have access to music or sound effects or whatever you might need, and

Natalie Boschan: It’s all in one place. So it’s not Avid specific. You can do it in other NLEs as well. So we’ve kind of gone through how we’ve done all of our folder structures, how we name our bins for different cuts and how we iterate those and how we do it for output. So what’s kind of the the next steps? We’ve we’ve come in, we’ve set up our partitions on our Unity or our ISIS or whatever our storage system of choice is. We now have our template built, so we have our folders for our project or episodes. What do we want to do next? Well, I I know that not every I know that not everyone reads the scripts, but I really like to read the script because then when dailies come in, I just know what’s going on. I I just like knowing what’s going on in the scene. I know it’s not imperative for an assistant to have read the script, but well, one well, it’s also easier to do the continuity. I really like to read the script, and for and one of those reasons is because it’s easier to do the continuity, and I always do my continuity before we start. And for those that might not work in scripted, a continuity is basically a one-line summary of every scene that gets sent with every cut. So the last thing that I want to do is when we’re sending out an editor cut and it’s 9o’clock at night, and I look and I see I don’t have a continuity, and I’ve got to fill that in for every single scene. You know, if you have 50 scenes, that takes a long time. So I always do my continuity before we even start production. So I do it on the first day of the episode, and then what I do from there is I use that continuity to then build our structure map Trello board.

Zack Arnold: Ooh, ooh, that sounds like something we’re going to get into much more in depth. Yeah, so stay tuned.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, so I put all of that on Trello. So then Zack has access to it, and then now my continuity is done. All I have to do is fill in scene timings, which some shows you don’t have to do that until producer cut. Some shows you do it in studio cut, but yeah. So then I don’t have to do anything once the cut goes out. I only have to worry about the output and the continuity is already done when I’m not in crazy mode, right? Because it’s pretty crazy when you’re doing editor cut for three days and dailies, and you just don’t really have the time. So it’s better to get that done and out of the way before anything even comes in, and you kind of have a lull. Yeah, and

Zack Arnold: That’s really again, I’m probably starting to beat this horse to death. But the idea behind building all these systems is that when you have the time to do it, do it. Ritualize the behavior as much as possible. Create good habits because when the time comes that you have three episodes that are open at once, one of which you’re in dailies and you’re four days behind. One of which you have going to the mix stage tomorrow and you have a bunch of problems and you need to recut a scene and you need to change the music and then you have another episode that’s supposed to air and there’s something wrong with that and you have to fix that too. Guess what? You don’t have time to think about anything. It’s think about it like professional athletes. They have done. If you think about a basketball player, they don’t think about their form when they’re shooting a free throw in the playoffs. It is so habitualized that all they have to do is automate their behavior, get into a zone, and just do it. They don’t have time to think. All they do is they react. The same principles taught in martial arts, where you just drill over and over and over. So when somebody actually throws a punch at your face, you’re not thinking, “Ooh, left foot forward, right foot back, bring arm up, put hand in face. Like you don’t think about that. It just becomes automatic. And I’ve essentially applied all of those principles that I’ve learned in martial arts to editing, so I’ve automated as many behaviors as possible. So all I have to do is cut, and this, this, these are examples of some of those behaviors where you don’t have to think or look for anything. It’s just there. So what I want to do now is transition to the next step, and I talked a little bit about this in a past podcast about going paperless. But I hate paper. I absolutely cannot stand having binders in front of me, having printed notes in front of me. My desk is empty. Literally, it looks like nobody even works in my office. It looks like somebody hasn’t moved in yet because all I have is a keyboard and a Wacom tablet and a mix board. That’s it. I have nothing else because everything else is digital. So now let’s transition from how we get started in Avid and how we build a template for getting all of our paper into Google Drive because you’re really the epicenter of everything at Google Drive. I just find stuff, but you’re the one that organizes it and make sure that it works and sifts everything.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, what I love about Google Drive is that I have a Gmail account, so. Anything that comes in, any attachment that comes in that needs to go into Google Drive, I just push the Google Drive button and direct it to the folder that it needs to go to, and there it goes, and it’s in Google Drive, and I don’t have to download it. I don’t have to download it, wait, move the file into another folder, then he doesn’t have access to it. I mean, you could do this on Dropbox too, but the reason I like Google Drive is for this specific reason, is so that I don’t have to download and then put into the folder. So yeah, Google. What’s great about our show right now is that the post staff also uses Google Drive, so they have they have their own folder structure to put all the production documents into, which is great for me. But if I didn’t have them doing that, what I would do is there you go. So we have our Empire editorial, you know, our Empire editorial folder, and in that folder we keep calendars, our continuity documents, which is stuff that is for locking. There’s a whole lot of documents you have to fill out, so I keep it all right here. Miscellaneous notes, if Zack still kept his notes in Google Drive, which he doesn’t anymore. One-liners, because those are important to keep around, especially all the different versions. Script notes, because Zack doesn’t use paper; he only uses the Google Drive. I keep all the script notes in one place, all of our scripts, and any information on visual effects. The thing about, like I said, on Empire, I don’t actually have to use our specific structure that often because they already use it on the post staff, and so there I don’t want to duplicate whatever they’re doing. So we go and access their folders. But if we were on a show that didn’t do that, these are the folders that we would use most often.

Zack Arnold: So, as far as Google Drive is concerned, the reason that I like it so much, and I’m not going to go into this in too much depth, because again, I talked about this whole process on my previous podcast about going paperless. But everything is in front of me at one time, and I can actually have multiple tabs open in my browser. So on my left window, I have all of my different Trello tabs. I have my email, which I almost never check, and I filter to the point where I get about two emails a day. And then I have all of my Google Drive tabs. So one thing that you actually physically cannot do with paper is have multiple pages open at once, unless you’re going to have multiple binders or you’re going to take pages out of binders. So one thing that always drove me nuts is I would be reading the script and then I’m like, oh, I have to look at the daily’s report to see if this scene is here, that scene is there. Flip back and forth, flip back and forth, and it drove me crazy. But I didn’t want to have multiple binders because there’s not physically enough space. But with Google Drive, I just have a tab open for one piece of paperwork, a tab open for another piece of paperwork. I have a tab open for my script, and I can just scan through it, and I can get to the pages I want almost immediately, and I can do searches as well. So if you have a physical binder and you need to flip from page five to page 40, that might take you 1020, 30 seconds. I can do it in five seconds. So not only is it more “quote unquote” convenient just because I don’t like paper? It actually makes me faster at what I do. I can access information faster, which means that I can cut faster, which means that my attention is not broken. Because so quickly, what can happen is you can be in your timeline, you can be cutting something. You’re like, oh wait, is this actor saying the right line? It sounds like they’re ad-libbing. Let me check the script. If you have to stop, flip open your binder, flip past other paperwork, and find the page, you’ve already lost your train of thought, and you’re already out of the scene. But if you’re just going over to another monitor, going to a tab that’s already open, searching for the page, or searching for the line of dialog, you find it immediately. Your train of thought has not been derailed, and you can continue cutting. So that’s why theoretically I think this is so important as a tool to bring into your work is because it can actually make you faster, more efficient, and not lose your creative train of thought. So that’s why I think the Google Drive workflow is just so imperative to the way that I do things, and I will never go back to paper again. The one piece of the workflow that I could never figure out that drove me nuts for years was when I tried to go paperless. I couldn’t figure out what to do with notes. It’s easy with the scripts now because all the script supervisors are sending everything digitally. You’re not getting faxed or photocopy pages sent to you, and even if you are, most likely you’re getting them already in a digital scanned form. But what I couldn’t figure out is how to handle notes. You would have producers walking in the room with a printed email, which drove me nuts, or they would just email you the notes, or they would send you an Excel spreadsheet with the notes. It’s like, how do I keep track of this? How do I keep it in one place? And that’s where I brought in Trello, and now we basically manage our entire lives, literally manage our entire lives in Trello, but we manage our whole workflow. And if you’re not familiar with it, Trello is T R E L L O. I’ll have a link in the show notes, and it is 100% free. So if you’re thinking, “Oh my God, a project management system has probably got monthly fees and it’s expensive, it’s free. If you want to have different power-ups and all kinds.

Zack Arnold: Other things, I think it’s like five bucks a month or something. But essentially, the core functionality, the all the things that you would need are going to be free. So the way that we use Trello, if you’re not familiar with it, to give you a very basic overview, just so you can visualize what Trello is. Imagine you have an entire wall in your office that’s a whiteboard, and what you can do on that whiteboard is you can put index cards everywhere, so we have an entire wall of index cards. But they’re digital index cards, and inside that index card, you can have information, you can have descriptions, you can have hyperlinks, you can have checklists, which are the core foundation of everything that we do to automate as many behaviors as possible and not make mistakes. You can also communicate on all of these individual cards. So this is how we don’t have email anymore. The only emails that Natalie and I get are from outside sources. Natalie and I don’t email. Well, there’s a caveat to that. If she finds a really good screenshot, she’ll send me a screenshot of somebody’s goofy face with a stupid caption. Those are the only emails I get during the day are the stupid caption screenshots.

Natalie Boschan: We don’t do that to our actors. They don’t. Oh my God, no! Because I’m sure that Taraji and

Zack Arnold: Terrence would be listening to this. So no, we would never do that.

Natalie Boschan: We would never do that to them. We would never

Zack Arnold: Do that to any other human being, and I’m sure every editor and assistant listening to this would say the same thing: that they never screenshot all the goofy-looking faces. So we don’t do that either. This is a theoretical concept.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah. In all fairness, I have I have screen I have screen grabbed your face.

Zack Arnold: You have so I don’t know.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah. So I don’t just do it to the actors. That gets it too.

Zack Arnold: Yeah. So so coming back to the idea of Trello, now that you have this basic visualization and it’s a very very simple program to learn. It’s it’s one of those things that’s easy to learn but takes a lifetime to master. I’ve been using Trello for a couple of years now, and I have to give a shout out to Canaan Flowers, who’s also the executive producer of this podcast. He introduced me to Trello, and it’s a life changer. So literally, do yourself a favor, take 15 minutes, sign up for a free account, and rock your world by seeing what this program can do for you in post. Yeah, the

Natalie Boschan: Greatest thing about Trello is that when you start doing anything, you start to have, and it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. It doesn’t matter if you’re at work or at home or whatever. You think, wait, I could do this all in Trello, and I can do it

Zack Arnold: Better, right? So basically, Trello, Trello is our crack cocaine. Yeah. So Natalie and I will run into each other’s bays, interrupt each other, and say, “Oh my God, you’re not going to believe this thing that I just did in Trello, and then you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s so cool. We have to do that.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: So we are absolute Trello nerds. It really took us a long time to figure out how do we actually build a solid workflow that’s organized, that’s efficient, and we’ve tried a lot of different iterations, and it’s a constantly evolving workflow. But I want to walk you through how we use Trello to manage everything, so we literally never miss a step. Don’t make stupid errors because again, the bullets are flying. There are three episodes going, or say, “Oh my God, I forgot to attach this to an email I sent with a cut, or I forgot to label this this way, or oh my god, I never sent this visual effects output to these people. It’s gotten to the point where it’s so automated we don’t even think about it. We’re just robots going through our checklist, making sure things are done, and never missing a step. Which again makes it so much easier for us to be creative. So our basic workflow is that we have two master boards that are set up. One of which is mainly for me, and this is called a structure map. So this is basically the digital version of the concept that I have taken from Walter Murch, where he has an index card for every single scene, and he puts it up on a wall. And I used to physically do that, and Natalie remembers because I had her spend days writing and printing out index cards on different colored. You know, the the cards were different colors, and we would do different colored highlights. And I said, “There’s got to be a better way to do this. And then I saw Trello, and I said, “My prayers have finally been answered. So just imagine index cards for each individual scene, but in digital form, which means that we can just rearrange them and move them as the structure changes, and it’s a very easy, fast way to say, “Oh, well, why isn’t this act working? Oh, you know what? It’s because this scene here needs to be in the other act. Let’s let’s just drag it over, and now you have a master visual representation of all your scenes. But it’s also great because you can color code your cards. So what we do with our structure map is we use it as a way to color code first what scenes have been shot, what scenes have been cut, what hasn’t been cut, what hasn’t been shot. So I like right now we’re looking at a structure map for our current episode, and I can see how much of it has been edited, how much of it hasn’t, what scenes are still which scenes still need to be shot that we haven’t even received, and I can do it instantly without having to rifle through pages and pages of paperwork, and then what we can do is just duplicate this. And if we have a complex story that has different storylines that can be woven in different orders, then we color code based on characters, based on story threads, based on emotion. So you have a visual color representation of your story, and this is some. That I have not done in reality, but I would imagine this would be immensely useful in the reality world because I’ve used it in the documentary world. This is essentially how I wrote my entire documentary film. Go far is I just wrote hundreds of index cards of every possible topic and storyline that would be in the film, put them up on a board, and just spent the week staring and moving everything into the right order. And then once the index cards were in the right order, I wrote a paper outline. I gave that to my editor, and 90 to 95 percent of that paper outline was what the finished film ended up being. Obviously, with things cut out to make it shorter, but this is how I organized all the information that I had. So I would imagine that a structure map like this in reality would be immensely useful. So, if you’re somebody that’s in reality and has so far been saying, “Oh, this stuff doesn’t apply to me, and reality is totally different than scripted, this is something that will absolutely change your life in the reality world. It’s not just for scripted editors.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, and especially for anyone who’s done a documentary will remember the days when they had all of their footage and all of their transcripts, and they had all of their and they had just all of the information that you get when you shoot hours and hours for documentary and reality, and you just have to move it around and put it in a story. And what you have to do is you have to cut out the cards, you have to cut out the transcripts. You have to cut everything. You know, you have to make all of it’s. It’s really labor intensive, basically. Just imagine being able to just type that, put it up, and it’s digital, and you can put it up on like a big flat screen if you wanted, and everybody can see it. There’s no like tacking it to the wall, moving it around. You know, physically moving it. You just literally drag and drop these cards on a monitor, and it’s so much easier than just than making the index cards.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and the the other area where this would be immensely useful that I haven’t even mentioned. If you’re in the documentary world, and I just I would give millions of dollars that I don’t have to be able to go back in time when I was working on my documentary film and have Trello because what you can do is you can have cards for individual interviews or individual sections, but you can attach documents. So you could have a card for each individual interview. You can attach the transcript to your card. Yep. So you never again have to search through your Finder, say, “Oh, where are my interviews? All right. Well, here’s my transcripts. All right. Here’s the transcript for this person or that person. What you can do is you can attach a screenshot of the person in the interview, have a visual representation of your card with that interview, then go into the card, go to the transcript, and do an instant preview of it right there. Copy paste from it right there. You don’t even have to open up Word or open up Pages or whatever your word processing document is. You have everything right in Trello, and it can be shared with teams worldwide. So there’s no reason that you couldn’t incorporate this into any editorial workflow on any type of project whatsoever. So this is really where it all started with Trello. This is the first thing that we experimented with, and we said, let’s stop doing these stupid index cards up on a board where we would do this for every episode. It took forever. I mean, it would take like a day just to write out the cards and print them and tape them on a wall. It was like a day or two of working now. The camera

Natalie Boschan: Doesn’t print right. Yeah, they’re upside down.

Zack Arnold: Such a pain.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: I mean, how long does it take you to build a structure map now when you have a one-liner?

Natalie Boschan: Oh, I don’t. You know, 25 minutes max.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, so that literally half an hour. You can do it. You know, like in less time than it takes you to eat your lunch and go to the bathroom, you can build an entire structure map of a show and have it right in front of you. Have it editable and be able to share it with anybody that you want worldwide. So it’s really, really powerful. And this is where we started. This was kind of my my introduction, my getting getting my feet wet in trying to use Trello in a post production workflow. And once that started working, I said, “All right, let’s take this to the next level and let’s get everything in Trello that we can that isn’t just a document. Because to me, Trello is not a way to just org. It’s not another version of a finder. It’s a way to be able to interact and organize information logically. So that’s why we have all of our documents in Google Drive, and we don’t need them in Trello. But what we have in Trello, aside from our structure map, is we have what’s called an episode map. And inside the episode map, the way that it works in Trello is you have lists and you have cards. So on the basic level, you have boards. The let me let me step back even further. You start with an organization, right? So I have an organizational board for fitness and post. I have one for GoFar. I have one for myself as a person. I have one for Empire. So the organization is Empire. Within Empire, we have two boards per episode. So we have an episode map and we have a structure map. Those are the only two boards that we need to cover every single task that we do in the course of an episode, and this can be applied to a feature or documentary as well. You would just need two boards total as opposed to two boards per episode. So we have lists on these boards, and those lists have. So the lists are like columns running horizontally, and the cards run vertically in each list. So what we do is we have a list for each iteration of the cut, and we keep track of all the elements within that. So the most important thing that we do with Trello is we have checklists. We establish habits, and if you want to really understand the importance of how a checklist can not only improve a workflow but improve well-being, alleviate stress. I highly recommend a book called The Checklist Manifesto that actually explains how lives, hundreds of 1000s of lives, have been saved in the medical field because of using checklists to make sure that simple steps were not overlooked, and there weren’t mistakes made because of human error. Because we are humans, we get exhausted, we get confused, we get overwhelmed, and we forget to do things. But if you always have a template and a checklist, you realize that oh wait, I just need to go through. Oh, you know what? We forgot to do this. We forgot to do that, and it eliminates mistakes.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah, because half. I mean, what I like to say is half of being an assistant editor is finding ways to cover your behind when something goes wrong. I mean, when you’re really down to it and you’ve got like two weeks to finish an episode, you can’t make a mistake. And because if you make a mistake, like one that costs a lot of money and you don’t want to cost your production money, and two, you just sometimes you just do not have the time. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you just really you’re really up against your air date. You just don’t have the time to make a mistake like that. So what these checklists do, and then also templates, which we should circle back to later. What these checklists do, what the checklists do is they make sure that you hit everything. Like Zack said, like they save lives. They also save your butt when your producer comes in and says, “So and so doesn’t have this. Why doesn’t he have this? Like, well, I put it on my checklist. Maybe I got you know. You can you can look and make sure that you did it and that you sent it. You sent everyone the right their proper documents. They got all of their files in the proper format, and that is just something that’s super important because if you send your composer the wrong format and they can’t use it and they got to work a weekend and you’re they’re calling you on a Saturday saying I can’t open my file how do I do this you have to figure it out. But what’s better is if you don’t do that at all in the first place. So this is where those checklists come in handy. So the first, so I made a bunch of templates for every episode. So the first checklist that I made is a new episode checklist, which is how how I start every new episode. And in that, it’s you know stuff that I already went over at the beginning of this podcast. So I create the media drive, the render, you know, the render drive, the projects. I have my own templates that I have to create at the beginning of the project. My own like template sequence, template you know temp files, that sort of thing. All the bins that need to be in the project so that every so that Zack can use them because sometimes you know you’re halfway through the project and you say, wait, where is that stock footage of? You know, I need stock footage of a prison, and then and Zack he looks in this project. He doesn’t see it. He asks me, and I got to go find it. And then you know, if I just would have looked in the Elements project to begin with, I would have seen that we had prison stock footage. So I always have that on my checklist to check all of those Elements projects, and then I have a separate checklist for all the paperwork that I have to get done before each iteration of the cut. So before we start an episode, I need to read all of the scripts so I know what’s going on. I need to make my continuity and I need to make the Trello structure map so Zack can have it in front of him when the first day of daily starts, so he can see what he’s getting into for the rest. You know, the next six, seven weeks, however long it takes us to cut an episode.

Zack Arnold: So then, basically, what we do once she’s done all of her new episode checklist, and again, like she said, it’s a template. So what we’re trying to avoid is that period of time where you’re saying, “Oh, what do I have to do now? What is that thing that I usually do? And you forget something important, and two weeks later, you’re like, “Oh man, I forgot to do that one thing, and now I have to do it. We’re eliminating thought from this whole process. There’s no thought that goes into this. There’s no creative brain power. It’s just you’re zombifying yourself, saying, “Now I must do this task. Now I must do this task. And that sounds unsexy, but I will just keep beating this horse. It allows us more time to be creative.

Natalie Boschan: Well, and it’s just a it’s just a mind drain when you you know do I have to send like what do I have to send a promo again? You go it’s like guys what do I just send a promo? I don’t know what do I just send a promo and you go and you go back into your paperwork like usually it’s in an email that came in the first day you came on and so you got to go all the way back to your emails and try to search it promo no it’s not her promo. No, it’s not like that is just such a mind drain. Like you can’t. I it’s it’s terrible. I hate going through that exercise every time. So making these checklists for every step of the way has been so helpful. So now like I just have it all in one spot, and I don’t have to go around asking people. What do I do again? What is this? Where is it in my email? It’s not in the email. It’s right here.

Zack Arnold: And not only is it a brain drain, but it’s a time suck. Yeah. So if you have to spend 15 minutes looking for your timing sheet that you got your second day of work, and now it’s six weeks later, and you’re doing your first lock and output, oh man, what’s our timing supposed to be? Where’s the timing sheet, right? That will. It’s a giant time suck, but if you have documents that you’re going to need to access that are just format sheets, document sheets, whatever it is, stick them on Trello on your master board, and you can find everything. So all the information is in front of you in one place, but it’s digital and changeable. So basically, if you have a cork board with a bunch of papers that are stuck to it, this is just the digital version, but you don’t have to have the same corkboard in five people’s offices. It’s just one corkboard. So think about it that way. So the next thing that we will do once kind of the new episode is set up and that checklist has gone through, we now have our list, which is for editors cut, and it’s broken down into cards for each day, so we can keep track of all the things that we have to do for that specific day of footage. So we have all the scenes that are listed that need to be cut. We have all the paperwork that needs to be done for that day. The people that need to be emailed with alerts or with confirmations. It’s all there. So there’s no thought that goes into a day’s worth of dailies except for cutting the day’s worth of dailies, which is what we’re hired for: is to cut those and get them organized and break them down, so all of the other mindless thought and busy work that goes into it is now automated, and we don’t have to think about It.

Zack Arnold: And the the next component that we have that’s super super helpful that I know that has probably taken 10 years off of your life, because I I was the one that sucked you into the world of scripted in the first place, and I saw you on your first season of a scripted TV show, and you probably had a decade taken away from your life of stress. Probably, and I think you lost most of your hair. Actually, I’m the one that lost all my hair. That hasn’t come back, but it’s because you didn’t have any type of procedure. You also really didn’t have any training, and nobody told you how what needed to be done. They just assumed you would know, but there was no procedure, there was no system. But now you have a system where, at the end of every cut, you have another checklist that you call a finalizing checklist. So walk walk us through kind of what is the process when you’re ready to finalize an episode.

Natalie Boschan: Every cut needs something different, right? So, and it kind of and you sort of build on every every cut. It sort of builds high. You know, there’s more and more stuff, and there’s more and more people that it starts to go to, and more and more people who are higher up, more important. So like the cuts sort of start to get like you know really really really big, and more and more people see it, and so that means if you make a mistake on something, more and more people are going to see it. So once your editor cut is complete, so like right, the first cut you go out that goes out is your editor cut. So most of this stuff that I have on this checklist is internal between Zack and I until I have to go and output it for the director, and that only goes, and it’s just the director, which is like a little like the director is obviously not an internal person, but it’s only one person, so like there’s not a ton of stuff. The director just needs the continuity, so I have to make sure I review the continuity and see that whatever I put in the first time when I did it all and before production, sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes there are revisions to scripts, and the intent of a scene changes, so the continuity has to change. Or I look at, or I look at it, and there might be a typo, whatever. I just check it over to make sure there’s no typos, there’s no mistakes on it at all. Matches the cut. So I review my continuity, and then I have a whole section of what I do for my outputs and outputting is outputting is a pain in the butt, and it’s a pain in the butt because there are so many different things that you need to do in order to output something. And the thing that has changed my life was when I was working. I worked on Once Upon a Time for a month, and I learned so much from those assistant editors. Those, the talent that’s over there at that show is amazing, and the things that they can do in that short of time is insane. So I don’t know this. Those guys over there are amazing, and the things. And I learned a lot from that show. And one of the greatest things that I learned was a template for my outputs. So basically, I have in Avid. I have a sequence with all of my basically every cut is going to have you know two second blacks in between for commercial breaks. It’s going to have a slate. It’s going to need a time code burn in, and it’s going to need like you know a little bit of a credit. It needs credits at the end, like just a title a title card that comes up for the credits. So this template that I have in Avid, this sequence template, I bring it to every single project and I bring it onto every single episode. And so whenever I need to output anything, all I do is I copy this template over, and it’s got my slate already in there. It’s got all of the blacks in there that I need. And I in in that same bin that had the screener template, like I call it my screener template, it also has a timecode burn in that is the same on every cut. So all I have to do because Zack works in act, Zack works in Ax. Wow, that’s that’s a lot to say. Zack works in Ax. Call me Josh. Yeah, yeah. So what I have to do is I load all of the I load all of the acts into my source monitor, and I just make sure I have my you know my in point on my first frame, my out point on my last frame. Make sure everything is you know all of my tracks are highlighted, and I just cut that in in between my in between the blacks that I have already set up on this sequence, and I make sure that the blacks are way up on like track 10 or 11 because Zack’s not going to use 10 or 11. He’s not going to use 10 or 11 video tracks on our show.

Natalie Boschan: Some shows you need to use that. Our show you don’t. So I put it way up on track 10. And this is one because I know that we’re probably not going up to track 10. And two, if I look at my sequence all in a row, I can easily find the act breaks because they’re way up top. They’re not all the way down below on the first track. They’re way up top on track 10. So I go through and I say there. So I go through and I can see I got one act, two acts, three acts, four acts, five acts. All the acts are there. I time out the show and all of this stuff that I’m talking right now, that I’m saying right now is all in a checklist. So for my outputs, basically, so I have all, so I put them. I so once I’ve put my cut, my ax into this sequence, I can look at my output checklist that’s on Trello, and what I the first thing that I have to do is my timing. So I’ve got to make sure that I have all of the show in the output, because it’s it may have happened one time that I sent a show short. Well, not

Zack Arnold: Only that, but I have I’m not going to name any names or name any shows. But there is a show that I worked on where a cut was sent to the network right before it locked, and it was missing an entire act.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah,

Zack Arnold: Not a shot, not a scene, a whole 10-minute act. And the funniest thing was nobody noticed, which means that nobody watches your guts because nobody said anything, and they locked the show. And we’re like, there’s an act missing from this show, and it’s 33 minutes, and it’s not even supposed to be 43 minutes. Whoops. The point is, it was you know a crisis averted. But these are the kind of human mistakes that people make. Yeah. It’s not because this person was incompetent. They were probably rushed. They were probably doing five different things at once. They didn’t have a system or a procedure. So because they didn’t have a checklist, all of a sudden it went out. Nobody knew. And the next time they’re thinking, I have to remember to do all the acts. I have to remember. I can’t forget. And if you’re ever saying to yourself, I just need to remember this next time because it’s important, you don’t have a system because your brain is not made to categorize and remember information. It’s made for processing intellectual and creative thought. So that’s why all the thought is out of our brains and out of these checklists. And there’s a whole bunch of things on here that may apply to what you’re doing. They may not apply to what you’re doing. The point is that you’re finding in your workflow all of the things that you’re saying to yourself: What do I have to do now? What do I have to do now? What can I forget? Put it on a checklist once. Create the template, and now you’re covered. So we we won’t go through every single little thing here, but there’s one small one that I think will give a really good example of something that’s very specific to our workflow that may spark an idea for you. Saying, “Oh wait, we have something stupid like that too. That should be on a checklist. So my process when I cut a music number on this show, because and this is mainly this is not because it’s the best workflow. It’s because of Avid and the way that Avid is multicam workflows, which frankly I don’t think is very good, and I think is very outdated. And I think that Premiere and Final Cut 10 are light years ahead when it comes to doing a multicam sequence. But I’ve adapted to using the tool that I have. So we will create multiple groups because you can only have up to 18 camera angles in a multicam group in Avid, but we had a music number today that has 54 angles in it. So I can’t put that all in one group if I want to be able to see all the angles in multicam perspective, where I can see nine angles in a bank. So we have to have multiple groups. But the brilliant thing about Avid is that you can’t look at multiple groups in your source monitor. So what I’ve done is I stack my groups on tracks above where I’m cutting, and I constantly match frame and go back and forth. Which means that in my edits, you will see where my music numbers are because I’m very clean about the way that I do my video tracks and my audio tracks. And we actually going backwards, we have a template set up for our cut, so every single scene, every single act, and every single show has everything on the same tracks, and all of our tracks are labeled. Everything

Natalie Boschan: Has a template.

Zack Arnold: Everything has everything has

Natalie Boschan: A template.

Zack Arnold: Everything has a label. We know where everything goes. There’s never a question of well, where should I put this or where should I put that. But going back to this example, when I’m doing these. Cuts. You can see where my music numbers are because you’re going to see these long uncut tracks for four to five minutes at a time that are stacked on each other, but those can’t go out in the cut. But we did an output once, and Natalie was busy, and this was before we really had honed in on our templates, and she left all of the groups in the cut, which meant when we watched the output, it was just one take of one shot for four minutes, and not all the cuts. So I said it’s not a big deal. You just made an error. We need to make sure it never ever happens again. So how do we do that? We make we put it in our template checklist, which means now there’s a little check that says delete music groups. That’s it. She never has to remember again whether or not there’s something she’s forgetting, she’s never going to make the mistake again, and it’s never going to suck any creative energy out of her brain because she just goes through the checklist and says, “Did I delete the music groups? Oh wait, no, I didn’t. I have to do that. But there’s no stress involved because it’s all right in front of her, and it’s a system.

Zack Arnold: Yeah.so that that’s why this is so valuable because you’re not going to make the mistakes because of human error. It’s all right in front of you.

Natalie Boschan: And that’s a really what’s a really good habit to get into is when you do make a mistake, is say, okay, how do I not make this? Why did this like examine it? Why did this mistake happen? You know where? What is the root of this problem? And then you look at it and you say, “Is this something that I can automate? Is this something where can I set up a system? Can I put it in a checklist? Can I set up some sort of way that will automate this so that I don’t make this mistake again? Because as much as you can make mistakes, and as much as you know, I have you know everyone’s made mistakes in their job. I’ve made mistakes, but I’ve never made the same mistake twice, and that’s because whenever something happens, I find a way to automate it later. A series of shots came in; they got missed by everybody here. Nobody knew that they were there until a couple of weeks later. It was fine, but what happened was is I realized why they got missed, which is because I missed one email in my inbox. It got buried with all of the production emails that I get every day. I get probably 20 production emails a day, and I sort of scan them and put them away. Scan them, put them away, and I said no more. And I do that on the weekends too because they’ll come in on Saturday mornings for Friday night shoots, and I’ll put them away, and I’ll put them away. This email happened to come in on a Saturday morning when I wasn’t totally in the work mode, and so I said to myself, when I miss this email, I said I’m never going to be checking emails on a Saturday again. I mean, I’ll look at the you know, make sure that nothing’s you know on fire, but never going to look at emails on a Saturday again. And then when I come in on Monday, I have a specific time set aside to say this is when I’m going to look at all of my emails, and I set up filters and I set up alerts for important emails coming in on my specific episode. So that’s the thing. Like if you’re going to make mistakes, you can make the mistakes, but don’t make the mistake twice. Look at your problem, see where you can fix it, and then fix it, and try as hard as you can to automate it, or put it in a checklist, or you know any anything that could take the like Zack said the human aspect out of it. The the problem where you’re fatigued, you’re you know you’ve just worked a long day, or it’s just a lot of stuff to do at one time.

Zack Arnold: None of which happen in post production. Nope, because we’re never tired, we’re never fatigued, we never have long days, and there’s never a lot to do. So really, nothing is going to be applicable in this show. Yeah, our jobs are all easy.

Natalie Boschan: Yeah.

Zack Arnold: So the the last thing I want to go over before we’re done, because I realize this is a longer episode than usual, but I’m really hoping that it can be a very useful template and a place to start for people that really want to revamp their workflows and get more out of them, so like I said, we have this finalizing checklist for every cut that goes out, and we just have a list for each iteration, and then we have a checklist for turnover, and that’s a much more robust checklist because when turnover happens and you lock something, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that needs to go to a whole bunch of different people, and again, it’s the same thing. The checklist is going to be different for everybody. So us running through our checklist is irrelevant. This isn’t. Here’s a checklist if you’re in a scripted environment on a studio show. It’s here’s the theoretical idea behind why you use a checklist. So we have our turnover checklist that’s broken down into every single element that goes to every single person. If you want to, you can even even have their contact information right there on the list if you want it, so you can just do everything right from your card. So it’s all about building the checklist that works the best for you. But the last thing that I want to talk about before we’re done is the ability to send information to your Trello board that is something you need to reference because the vast majority of email is-it’s things that don’t need to be emailed. I just people think that email is a productivity system and a conversation system, and it is the most inefficient way to communicate and manage projects and tasks on the planet. So we’ve eliminated email as much as possible, and we never email each other. But they’re obviously going. Other things that come into us, but let’s take for example, you get an email every episode that’ll say, “Here are the music cues that are approved for this episode, or you get an email here’s our visual effects bid. Right? I don’t want to have to find that in my email later. I want it all in front of me because it’s episode specific. So all you do is you can get an email address for your Trello board, you can copy it into your address book in whatever program you’re using, and just give it a name. So call it, you know, Trello board episode 209 map or whatever it is, and you just forward that email to your board, and all of a sudden you have a card on your board that has every single piece of information in that email plus the actual attachment, so we will have a list that has anything we need to know about visual effects, things we need to know about music delivery. We’ll always get emails from the studio with broadcast standards and practices, which is our our BS and P notes, where they say, “Oh, this person said a bad word or whatever it is. Here’s a list of the notes you need to have. That’s an email that we get from Fox. We just forward that to Trello, and it just goes right where our notes are. And I also keep all of my creative notes in checklists in Trello. So now, if I’m in the process of you know doing a cut, and let’s say that I’m doing a studio network cut, and the showrunner’s in the room, she’s like, “Wait a second. When did this happen? How did where did this change come from? I didn’t make this change. I don’t have to rifle through notebooks and folders and emails. Every single note that I’ve ever been given on an episode is in one board, and I just go to the card that has all the notes for that episode, and I say, all right, well, looks like it was on the director’s cut. It was on this day, and this is the note that was given. Oh, okay. I guess it wasn’t the cut that I saw. I apologize. I take that back. So being able to access information that quickly and succinctly not only makes you more efficient, but makes people want to work with you more because they trust you.

Zack Arnold: So now we’re really getting into the deep levels of how this can be useful because it’s not just about oh it’s a good workflow or oh yeah it’ll save time out of my day, doing this makes you more hireable. On the the pilot that we worked on, I was told by the showrunner, by the producers, they’re like you work so fast and it’s such a smooth process. How are you able to do this? And I’ve just told you exactly how I’m able to do it. This makes me more hireable. I get through things faster. I have more time to be creative. That makes me more money. So it’s not just about having cool tips and tricks. This gets me jobs. And if you go to somebody and you say, “Check out this awesome Trello board with everything, they’re going to say, “Oh my God, this is so cool! We have to hire this guy on every single project. That’s why I feel this stuff is so important, and why I wanted to share it with people. Just not so you can have a new tool in your toolbox. You can literally change the way you do everything, and it will change the course of your whole your whole career. So that’s a much bigger, broader version of why we’re doing this. But we went down to brass tacks and down to the little tiny details, so you can see how we did it. As I mentioned before in the show open, I’m going to have a document, a free PDF that you can download that actually has your own checklist that we created that covers all of the bases of the things that we covered today. But more importantly, if you’re thinking to yourself, this all sounds really really cool, but there’s a lot to this, and there’s a lot of steps, and I don’t really feel like I could get through this on my own, and I would want to help. Well, guess what? We’re building a training program that would be online that takes you through every single tiny step to build a workflow like this. So if you just download that free PDF, you will then be added to the Fitness and Post mailing list, which means that you will be the first person to find out, have access to, and most likely get a discount on this program when it releases. So, if this is something that you’re interested in, again, like I said in the beginning, just go to fitnessandpost.com/54 download. You’ll get a free PDF with a whole bunch of checklists to give you the basics of where to get started, and you’re also going to be the first to find out when a product is releasing that actually gives you full tutorials on how to build this entire workflow for yourself. No matter if you’re in documentary, reality, scripted, it doesn’t matter. It can apply to any type of workflow whatsoever. So I want to thank Natalie profusely for hanging out with me way past the deadline. Hopefully she doesn’t put the overtime on her time card because we’ll hear about it. Yeah. But this was a heck of a lot of fun, and I hope that everybody that was listening enjoyed all the information that we shared today. So thank you, Natalie.

Natalie Boschan: Yep, of course. Good time. All right. Talking about organization.

Zack Arnold: We are OCD nerds.

Natalie Boschan: Yep, very true.