Editing Timeline

What this is about

A timeline is not just a canvas, it is documentation. Track order that follows a convention — dialogue at the bottom, effects above, music on top, graphics on their own video layers — lets a sound editor or a colleague read the project in minutes instead of reverse-engineering it. Named markers, colour-coded clips and locked layers do the same job. On projects with several versions, this discipline is the difference between duplicating a sequence safely and discovering later that two edits drifted apart unnoticed.

A term only helps when everyone on set means the same thing by it — so what follows is how it is used, not a dictionary definition.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Keep a fixed track convention: dialogue low, effects above, music on top, graphics separate
• Duplicate the sequence before any large change and date the copy — undo history is not a backup
• Markers with real text beat coloured flags nobody can decode two weeks later

With TillyGen

Feedback collected in TillyGen with timecode maps straight onto positions in the timeline, so a note becomes a task an editor can find.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.