I hope this is cool to post here - A VFX Editor in the UK has been developing some free tools for assistants and he has created a WhatsApp Chat Bot called FrameShift to understand workflows, so that he can get a better idea of what tools to make. I've had a go and was pretty impressed. I'm going to share the original post from LinkedIn below. We're gonna need a bigger bot. I've spent months building VFX editorial tools. EDL comparison. VFX ID assignment. SubCaps to Markers. Small tools that solve real problems. But I kept hitting the same wall: I'm solving MY problems. I know my workflow inside out. I don't know yours. So I built something different. It's called FRAME/SHIFT, a WhatsApp agent for anyone in post-production, editorial, or VFX. Message it. Tell it what you do. Tell it what's broken. Tell it what task eats your week alive. It speaks the language, turnovers, EDLs, ShotGrid, FileMaker, count sheets, metadata that vanishes between departments. It's not a survey. It's a conversation with something that actually understands the pipeline. I want to know: Where does your workflow break? What would you automate tomorrow if you could? What tool do you wish existed? Every answer helps me build better tools for this industry. Not generic project management platforms. Not another ShotGrid wrapper. Real editorial-first tools, built by someone who's spent 17 years doing this work by hand. VFX Editors. Assistants. Supervisors. Coordinators. Post Sups. If you touch the pipeline, I want to hear from you. Jump in. Ask it something. Break it if you can. https://wa.me/447511188809

Can anyone give me an easy explaination how I can unpack this submaster for turnover? I theory it supposed to be bottom layer first. But that doesn't make sense by the time I get to the upper most/bottom layer I can't seem to get it in the correct order on the timeline.

Got a quesiton for the collective. I have 2 ediors working on a series. The music supervisor has provided a bin of tracks for them to use. I had set them up with Favorites Bin which automatically updates and a colour code system, so they know if a track has been claimed. The downside is, one of the editors works with stereo music and the other likes to work with mono. They keep changing stereo/mono tracks in the bin which is driving them both batty. Can anyone suggest a different system/method? The only thing I can think of is to use the favorites bin. Keep the orginal set of music in there. Duplicate the source files adding the suffix_mono to them. Import this new batch into the same bin. Then the editors can colour code the track they have chosen, and take either the appropriate mono or stereo version. Does this make sense?

Can someone help me modify the codebook for multiple episosed of TV? Normally I throw all the episodes into the Continuity and differentiat them but putting the series and episode number with the scene eg 201/01 for series 2 epsiode 1 scene 1. I also put the series and episode number into the REEL column to help keep things seperate. It would be really handy to have a seperate page per episode. Failing that - pointing me in the direction of some decent tutorials would be handy.

Ok, it's done. All videos for all courses and products are now available in the Classroom. If anyone has any trouble accessing these please let us know and we'll get it fixed right away. Sorry for this hiccup. Just one of the many issues we've had to deal with making the transition from our former platform.