Notes
Writing, changing and deleting the notes on a cut, and what their colours mean to Avid, Resolve and Premiere.
A note is a marker on a track at a frame: a colour, some words, who wrote it, and whether it has been dealt with. Producers and EPs can write them without being able to edit anything else — that is the whole point of them.
Writing one
Three ways in, all the same dialog:
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- New note at the top of the Notes panel, which names the timecode it is about to use.
- Right-click a track in the timeline and choose New note here…, which uses the frame you pointed at rather than where the playhead happens to be.
Enter saves, Shift-Enter starts a new line, Escape cancels. The note lands on the first enabled picture track unless you pointed at a different one.
Changing or deleting one
- Right-click the note on the timeline: Edit this note… or Delete this note.
- Edit… on the note in the Notes panel.
Deleting is undoable, like any other edit. This is the one way a note can be removed: edits never delete notes on their own — markers ride ripples, and an extract collapses them onto the extract point rather than throwing them away.
Resolving is not deleting. Resolve records which saved version addressed the note and keeps it, faded, where it was. That is the one an editor wants when a note has been actioned: the history of why a change was made is part of the cut.
On the timeline
A note is a small coloured tab at the top of its track, with a hairline up into the timecode ruler so it can be read out. Resolved notes stay in place at a third of the weight.
Colours
The eight are Avid's eight, and they are named rather than given meanings: red is a producer's change on one show and do not use on another, so the convention belongs to the show.
| B/side | Avid .txt | Resolve | Premiere |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red | red | Red | Red |
| Green | green | Green | Green |
| Blue | blue | Blue | Blue |
| Cyan | cyan | Cyan | Cyan |
| Magenta | magenta | Fuchsia | Purple |
| Yellow | yellow | Yellow | Yellow |
| Black | black | Cocoa | (Orange — see below) |
| White | white | Cream | White |
Coming the other way, Resolve's sixteen and Premiere's eight land on the nearest of these. Four of them — Pink, Purple, Fuchsia and Rose — all arrive as magenta, so a facility using those for three different things will see them merge. Lavender becomes blue, Sky becomes cyan, Mint becomes green, and Lemon, Sand and Orange all become yellow.
One colour does not survive a round trip. Premiere has no black marker: its eight are Avid's with Black and White replaced by Orange and Purple. A black note sent to Premiere comes back yellow. Nothing can fix that — the colour is not in Premiere's set — so it is written down here and in domain/src/markercolours.ts rather than left to be discovered on a turnover.
A colour nobody recognises becomes red rather than being dropped: the words are the point.