Every week, Frame.io Insider asks one of our expert contributors to share a tip, tool, or technique that they use all the time and couldn’t live without. Keep your timelines tight and tidy with Avid Sequence Templates.
One of the many tasks for assistant editors is to keep timelines tidy and organized for their editors. Particularly in long-form projects. You certainly don’t want to wait until you have to turn things over to online before you sort your audio into Dialogue, SFX and Music tracks.
It’s better to build an organized and labeled timeline from the start. And one way to expedite this is with an Avid function called Sequence Templates.
How to use Avid Sequence Templates
From your user settings, double click “sequence templates” to open the window to configure your templates. You can also right-click in the background of the timeline and select “Create Sequence Template.”
You can configure These templates with any number of video/audio/data tracks, you can name the tracks, set whether the audio tracks are mono/stereo, as well as set up the default starting timecode of sequences using the template.
Once you’ve created and named the template it can be employed at any time by:
- Right-clicking in a bin
- Selecting “New sequence”
- Selecting your template from the drop down menu.
Once you employ a template it will then become the default. Meaning that next time you create a sequence using the keyboard shortcut of Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+N, that will be the template used.
This time it takes to set up a template will save you a lot of effort further down the road. It’ll help keep you on track (pun intended) with keeping a tidy timeline!
Sequence Templates are a relatively recent addition to avid, initially arriving in v2022.10 and being updated with the ability to conform an existing sequence to a template layout in v2023.8.
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