Most of what I hand an editor is not footage. It is an organized project.

On documentary and episodic work that is half the job. The cards come in for weeks, the volume gets away from you, and whoever cuts it should be able to open the project and find things without calling me. Bins that make sense, naming that holds, selects where they belong.

The one thing I could never organize was slow motion.

Why you cannot see it

The camera slows it down before it ever writes the file. You shoot 120, the card does the arithmetic, and what lands is an ordinary 24fps clip that happens to be in slow motion. Drop it on a timeline and it behaves. Nothing to conform, nothing to retime, nothing broken.

The catch is what that leaves behind. A file that has already been slowed has no reason to mention it was ever fast, so it reports 24fps, same as every normal take on the shoot. Your best shot of the day and a throwaway cutaway are indistinguishable until you open them.

There is nothing to sort by and nothing to filter on. You find it by opening clips one at a time.

I have wanted a fix for this for about five years, since the jobs got big enough that opening clips one at a time stopped being a minor annoyance and started being a line item. I finally built one last month.

It is not just me

This comes up constantly in editor forums, usually phrased as some version of "why does my 60fps footage show as 24fps". The answers people get back are all about conforming: open Clip Attributes, change the clip speed, set the retime percentage.

That advice is correct for a different problem. It is for a clip that reports 120fps and plays too fast. Sony already did the slowdown for you, so there is no mismatch to fix. What you actually have is a clip you cannot identify, and almost nobody answers that question, including the AI tools people now ask first. I checked. They confidently tell you to compare the source frame rate to the timeline, which cannot work here, because the source frame rate is the problem.

What it does

It reads what the camera actually recorded instead of what the file says about itself, and tags the slow clips: a keyword, and orange in the bin.

That last part is the bit that changed my day. You stop interrogating clips and start seeing them. Scroll a bin and the slow motion is just visibly there. One smart bin collects it. Run it again when new cards land and the new material sorts itself in.

On one Chicago shoot it pulled 1,582 slow-motion clips out of 4,986 files. Nobody was ever going to find those by scrubbing, and no editor should have had to.

It is called SQ Finder, it is free, and it lives on chimping.io with the installer and the technical write-up.

The part I keep thinking about

The things that cost the most time on a big job are almost never the hard parts. Nobody forgets how to light a room.

It is the small stuff you work around without thinking, back when the shoots are small enough that working around it is free. You know exactly what you want and you never stop long enough to build it, because there is always another job. Five years of that, and then a quiet month.