Batch-Edit Multiple Items
Sometimes you get handed a camera card or a hard drive that’s from a single scene, location or subject matter. Being able to quickly add metadata to multiple files at once becomes very handy. Once you review the footage and have all the desired clips selected right-click over one of the clips and select Edit Multiple or Command - Shift- M on a Mac and Control- Shift- M on Windows.
An Edit Multiple Items menu will appear where you can start adding in the metadata for those shots, giving you the option to keep the metadata that’s already there or change it with the information you will input.
Once you enter the metadata that is important to you and your team you can apply those metadata changes by clicking the OK button. Below you will see that my added metadata has been applied to the selected sample clips.
A note on pre-edit workflows
Whether you are working as a one-person powerhouse or within a team it’s always a great idea to go through the pre-edit process of organizing, logging, and tagging your media. Relying on memory when revisiting a project months later if not years and may take you a few hours to assimilate to the project and figure out what I had done. This almost feels like looking for a needle in a haystack, multiple days of shooting accumulating to multi terabytes of media. That’s why the pre-edit process is so important, it can save you and your team from losing that precious time when a client sends you that unexpected (expected) email wanting to make a change several months later.