Most client notes still reach the edit suite as a list. It might be an email full of timecodes, a PDF exported from a review tool or a spreadsheet someone cleaned up, and it ends up on the second monitor.
The editor types a timecode into Premiere, fixes the note, looks back at the list and tries to remember which line came next. Somewhere around note 14, a line gets skipped.
Markers take the list off the second monitor. Each note sits on its frame, Shift+M jumps to the next one, Cmd+Shift+M (Ctrl+Shift+M on Windows) goes back, and the Markers panel (Window > Markers) shows the text of every note in timeline order.
The hard part is getting the notes onto the timeline, in the right place.
In short
- Premiere can’t import markers from a CSV, but it reads a Final Cut Pro 7 XML and creates a new sequence with them.
- Move the markers to your own sequence with an adjustment layer and the Copy Paste Includes Sequence Markers option.
- Check one note you can place for certain to find any offset between the client’s timecode and your timeline.
- Work from the last marker back to the first, and change each marker’s color when the fix is done.
What Premiere will import, and what it won’t
Premiere has no option for reading markers from a CSV or a spreadsheet. Users have been asking for it on Adobe’s ideas forum for years, and the gap explains why there are free web converters with guides in about ten languages, plus paid extensions that do this one job.
What Premiere does read is a Final Cut Pro 7 XML. Bring one in with File > Import and you get a new sequence carrying the markers.
That new sequence is the first trap, because the markers live on it and you’re cutting a different one. To move them across:
- In the imported sequence, put an adjustment layer on an empty track and stretch it over the whole length.
- Turn on Copy Paste Includes Sequence Markers in the Markers menu.
- Copy the adjustment layer, switch to your sequence, park the playhead where the reviewed export started and paste.
- Delete the adjustment layer. The markers stay.
While that option is on, every copy and paste between sequences drags markers along, so turn it off when you’re done.
Start timecode and other offsets
The client’s timecodes count from zero, the first frame of the file they watched. Your sequence may start at 01:00:00:00, a broadcast convention many editors use on every job, and then a note at 00:00:42 sits at 01:00:42:00 on your timeline. A whole hour of difference is easy to spot.
The small offsets cause the trouble. If the review copy was exported from an in point at 00:00:37:12, or has a slate or a few seconds of black at the head, every note is off by the same amount.
Markers land a shot early or late and still look plausible, so the editor fixes the wrong moment and the note comes back in the next round.
Before you import, pick one note you can place for certain, like a hard cut or a title coming in, and check where it lands. If it’s off, the difference is your offset, and it’s the same for every note.
In the XML route that means pasting at the in point you exported from instead of at the start of the sequence.
Frame rate and drop frame
The last field of a timecode counts frames, so what it means depends on the frame rate. 00:01:10:20 is 0.83 seconds past 1:10 at 24 fps and 0.67 seconds past it at 30 fps.
A list taken from a player running at 30 fps can include frame 27, which doesn’t exist in a 25 fps sequence.
Plenty of review players show only minutes and seconds, which leaves every note up to a second out before any of this starts. At 25 fps a second is 25 frames, easily enough to be on the wrong side of a cut.
At 29.97 fps there’s also drop frame. Drop-frame timecode skips the frame numbers 00 and 01 at the start of every minute except every tenth one, 108 numbers an hour, so the timecode keeps pace with the clock.
Non-drop timecode skips nothing and falls 3.6 seconds behind the clock every hour. A list written in one and typed into a timeline that displays the other is off by 54 frames, about 1.8 seconds, at the half-hour mark.
Premiere shows drop frame with semicolons (00;30;00;00) and non-drop with colons, so check the separators in the list before you start typing.
An XML places markers by counting frames at the frame rate written in the file, which makes the drop-frame label irrelevant. That frame rate still has to match the video the client actually watched.
Comments on a range
“The music comes in too early, from 0:42 to 0:47” is a note about five seconds, and most lists flatten it into a single point at 0:42.
Premiere markers can have a duration, so it’s worth putting it back. Double-click the marker, set the duration, and the marker spans the stretch the client meant. A note like “the interview section drags” deserves a marker as long as the section.
Notes with no moment at all, like “it feels long overall”, don’t go on a marker. Keep them at the top of your list as notes about the cut.
A short guide to giving feedback an editor can use, sent to the client before the first round, helps with both problems.
Working through the markers
Import the markers before you change anything, then work from the last note back to the first. Whether sequence markers move when you ripple-delete depends on the Ripple Sequence Markers setting in the Markers menu and on the tool you used.
Going backwards keeps the question out of the way, since the notes you haven’t reached yet still sit on picture you haven’t touched.
When a fix is done, change the marker’s color in the same dialog where you set the duration. Whatever is left in the original color is still to do, and before you export v2, one pass with Shift+M shows whether anything got skipped.
How this works in RecReview
RecReview gets comments into Premiere in two ways.
The first works on every plan. On the review page, the download icon above the comment list offers Premiere (XML) and DaVinci Resolve (XML) to members of your workspace once the video is ready to watch.
Each comment becomes a marker named [Comment] with the author and the first line of the note, and the full text goes into the marker’s comment. AI Review findings come along as [AI] markers.
The imported sequence starts at 00:00:00:00, so you move the markers onto your own sequence with the copy and paste route above. In this export, a comment on a range arrives as a single-frame marker.
The second is the Premiere panel, on the Pro and Studio plans, for Premiere 25.6 or newer. It finds the video by its code in the name of the sequence, its clips or the project, which is one more reason to name sequences after the video.
Clicking a comment in the panel moves the playhead to its frame.
In the panel’s ⋯ menu, Markers puts every comment on the active sequence in one step that a single undo removes.
Each marker carries the author and the time in its name and the comment in its note, lands on the nearest frame of your sequence and keeps the duration of a comment on a range.
Positions count from the first frame of the sequence, whatever its start timecode says. If the sequence has an in point when you link the video, the panel uses it as the time offset, tells you so, and lets you change it in the panel settings.
When the client adds more notes later, running Markers again on the same sequence brings in only the new ones.
