Blackmagic Forum

I've had a couple of instances where an assistant was supposed to work on something and did not open the correct timeline and made changes, saved them, end of day backed up the project, with the end result being that version of the project was irretrievably lost.

QUESTION: Is there a way to LOCK a timeline so it can be viewed but no changes can be made? I know I could lock video and audio track but I'm hoping there might be a way to lock a specific timeline that would protect everything in one step, including needing permission to unlock it.

The Timeline menu, under Lock tracks allows the edit-locking of all video tracks and all audio tracks.
You can shift+click on most track controls on the side of the timeline to have the same effect.

The other option would be to turn on the position-lock for the timeline. While not a complete lockdown, it does prevent avoidable mistakes.

Both are per-timeline options.

Thanks. That's where I'm at now, it's all or nothing.

I was hoping there was master control I could use that wouldn't change the state of the timeline. This could be locked and later unlocked and returned to it's previous state of certain tracks being locked and others not.

Perhaps a feature request, although I may be the oddball by doing things this way.

Robert Frank wrote:I've had a couple of instances where an assistant was supposed to work on something and did not open the correct timeline and made changes, saved them, end of day backed up the project, with the end result being that version of the project was irretrievably lost.

I think this is not so much a feature that's needed but an operational situation.

Whenever there's a question in a situation like this, I think you have to do a SAVE AS, then give the new project a version number, plus today's date. That way, the idea would be only the newest version would be the final, and you'd have the previous day's version as an emergency backup "just in case."

The other way to do it is to duplicate just the timeline and give that the new version number (and/or date), so you at least have the previous timeline to fall back on. Whenever I'm about to make a fairly destructive edit or invoke a lot of changes, I'll save a new version on the off-chance I screw up. Once we verify the new version is right, then I delete the previous timelines and only keep the final-final timeline in the final project.