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At its simplest, collaborative workflow uses a “first come, first served” model to manage who has can make changes to what. Essentially, the first collaborator to select a bin in the Media Pool, open a timeline, or select a clip in the Fusion page or Color page gets a “lock” on that item. Once an item is locked (indicated by a colored collaborator badge), other collaborators can look at it, but they cannot make changes. This prevents versioning conflicts from occurring.
Bin and clip locks are released when a collaborator selects a different bin or timeline in the Media or Edit pages, or a different clip in the Fusion page or Color page. At that point, the changes that have been made to the previously locked item are “checked in” and made available to all collaborators once they refresh their project (by clicking a circular refresh icon that appears to the right of bins in the Media Pool or in the corner of the Edit page Viewer).
All changes that collaborators make are automatically saved to the project as they’re made, so no work will ever be lost as you collaborate with your team. However, each collaborator gets to decide when they want to update the bin, timeline, or clip they’re currently working on to see the changes made by everyone else, in order to prevent a kaleidoscope of constant alterations to compositions and grades from being a distraction while you’re working.
The following sections describe Bin and Timeline locking and Clip locking in more detail.
Automatic Bin and Timeline Locking
Whenever a collaborator opens a particular bin, that bin and its contents are locked, preventing any other collaborators who open that project from making alterations to anything inside that same bin. This prevents versioning conflicts while work is in progress. When a bin is locked, you can still view its contents, if for instance you just need to figure out where a particular clip has been put, but you can’t make changes.
Collaborators can open locked bins and see the contents for reference, but they cannot make any organizational or editorial changes. The only things that can be changed once a bin and its contents are locked are the creation or alterations of clip compositions in the Fusion page, and alterations to clip grades in the Color page.
You can always tell when a collaborator has a lock on a bin and its contents because a badge appears to the right of the bin in the Bin list, and in the corner of timeline thumbnails that are visible in the Media Pool browser area. Hovering the mouse over that badge in the Bin list reveals a tooltip with that collaborator’s name.
An icon indicates that another collaborator has a lock on the Projects bin.