Hi all, Currently assisting on a picture cut in Avid Media Composer and my butt is starting to clench - which can only mean one thing... soon I will have to spend a considerable amount of time making an Optical Effects List of each reel of the film for the DI. In the past, I've dropped markers on clips that have effects - typing the effect and percentages into the marker text window, then file export. You know the drill. You also know how long this can take, especially when there's changes and updates are needed. Multiply that by each production, and you start to wonder if your pet dog has a better life. It's 2026. AI is taking over our lives. Surely there must be a better way to create Optical Lists. I've recently come across Parser IO (https://parserio.com/) — found a demo on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCHQ0bhFw_c) that explains it well. It works like a dream, but it's a bit pricey. How is the MTWF community dealing with this task? I've heard that making a sequence report in Avid is sufficient... but I haven't tried that workflow myself. @Richard Sanchez, what is your secret source? Can we expect a new Opticals tab on the Digital Codebook any time soon? Very best regards, Matt

Hey @Richard Sanchez, hope this finds u well. I see that there's a 4.3 update to the codebook - looking forward to using this version on my current joint! Is there a video that explains all the genius-level updates?

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?