One film in, and the canvas soon holds more than one card: two or three takes of the same shot recorded, one set of reference images fed to several nodes. DOTV gives you two tools for filing things away — stacking a few cards into one pile, and tagging a node. Both only change how they show up on the canvas and how they get referenced; nothing inside the nodes is touched.
A stack takes up one cell's worth of space on the canvas: tidying, making room and being pushed aside by another node all treat it as one node. So do not count on moving the whole pile by dragging it somewhere else — what you drag is the whole stack.
A re-recorded previz clip, a re-stitched final cut, a final cut that came out alongside that smart-edit node — these "another version of the same thing" stack up by themselves: collapsed, only the newest shows, with two cover cards fanned out behind it, so one glance says there is a pile here.
Select two or more nodes and click Stack in the toolbar above the canvas and they become one stack (that is where the lower one comes from). The three in a manual stack are not versions, and you decide which sits on top: spread it out and click one of them for Bring to top.
The whole stack counts as one asset: when a downstream node references it, the top one is what it takes and the whole stack is fed in together; add one to the stack or remove one from it and the nodes referencing it follow along. Spread out, the head card carries Unstack — each one is laid out on the same grid where it stood and goes back to being an ordinary node.
A collapsed stack shows the union of the whole stack's tags: every tag carried by any of its cards counts. A tag that only some of the members carry is dimmer and has "2/3" after it — one glance says two cards in this stack carry it. Tagging a collapsed stack tags the whole stack.
A tag is a piece of text on a node, not an internal id — so copy a node, copy the whole canvas, or share the work, and the tags travel with it. A node can carry as many as you like; past a few they fold into "+N" after the title.
Right-click a node, or select several and click Tags on the toolbar, and the picker opens:
| What you do there | How |
|---|---|
| Apply | Tick a tag in the list |
| Remove | Untick it. When only some of a stack carry it the box is half-ticked — one click applies it to all, and when all carry it one click takes it off all |
| Create | Type a name in the field at the bottom and press Enter. If the library does not have that tag yet it goes into the library first (a colour that is used least is picked for it), then it is applied to these nodes |
| Other people's tags | Tags on the node that your own library does not have are listed too (in gray, marked "Not in my tags") — leave them out and tags someone else applied could never be taken off here |
Colours are each person's own set. Your tag library (names, colours, order) lives in your own account and follows you to another machine: collaborators on one canvas see the same words, while colours come from each person's own library; anything your library does not have shows in neutral gray. Seven come in the box (Style ref, Character, Scene, Props, Pending, Approved, Discarded); their names follow the interface language, and they can be renamed and deleted.
Manage tags at the bottom right of the picker opens that dialog:
Zoom out to the overview level and the tags become a row of coloured dots on the corner of the card — at that size the words are gone, but the colours still read.