You finish a four-hour session with twenty markers on the clock. Your editor is in another city, and needs to know where the good parts are. You send the video.
The video arrives with chapters baked in, and not one of them shows up on the editing timeline. Two different things are going on, and knowing the difference saves a week of back-and-forth.
What the marker file is
Every recording you mark leaves two files behind. The video, and a plain .txt file next to it named after the session - 2026-08-31 03-54-03.txt sitting beside the recording from that date.
Open it in any text editor and you get one line per marker:
00:00:00 - Recording Start
00:02:28 - Resonance Point
00:07:44 - Charms
00:08:12 - Artefacts
00:30:30 - Cutscene
01:21:21 - Resonance PointHours, minutes, seconds, then the label you put on the button. The first line is always 00:00:00 - Recording Start, written for you. Everything after it is a marker you tapped, in the order you tapped it.
That file is the handoff. Not the video.
Why the embedded chapters don’t help your editor
When a recording stops, AnyMarker writes the markers into the video file itself as chapter metadata. Every player worth using reads them - QuickTime Player, VLC, Plex, Infuse - so anyone watching the finished file can jump straight to the boss fight.
An editing timeline is a different world. Premiere, Resolve, and Final Cut don’t read embedded MP4 chapters as timeline markers. They wouldn’t know what to do with them if they did. Chapters describe a video that is finished; markers describe a moment on a timeline that is still being cut. Your editor needs the second thing.
The .txt is where those timecodes live.
Getting the file to your editor
For a two-person operation, the simplest handoff is the file itself. Send the .txt alongside the video. Your editor opens it next to the timeline, reads 00:30:30 - Cutscene, and drags the playhead there.
For twenty markers that works fine, and it costs nothing to set up. It stops working when the timestamps need to become real markers in the timeline, or when there are two hundred of them.
Naming the buttons is most of the handoff
Those labels come straight from the marker buttons in your preset. A preset built around Charm, Quest, and Boss hands your editor a file anyone can read at a glance. A preset of eight buttons all called Highlight hands them a column of numbers.
This is where per-game and per-show presets earn their keep. Name the buttons the way your editor thinks about the footage - Cut, Reset, Sponsor, Death - and the marker file reads like a rough paper edit instead of raw telemetry.
A preset cannot cover everything, and you don’t have to stop and rebuild one mid-session. The dock also has a Custom marker field with an Add Marker button, so when something worth keeping arrives that no button anticipated - a glitch, a line you want clipped, a moment you know you will want later - you type a name and tap once. It lands in the .txt alongside everything else, labelled the same way.
The file is plain text, so nothing is final. Fix a typo in a label and save, and it stays valid for the manual embed, the converter, and the YouTube description alike.
Turning timestamps into timeline markers
Before you convert anything, look at what the video already carries. Open the recording in QuickTime Player or VLC and the embedded chapters give you a clickable list - click Boss Fight, read the timecode, and drop the playhead there in the editor. Your editor gets the same thing on their machine, with no .txt and nothing to convert.
Markers sitting inside the project are the other half of the job. A chapter lives in the video file and describes a cut that is finished. A timeline marker is an object in the editing project, and every editor stores those its own way. If your editor only needs to find a moment, the chapters are enough. When the timestamps need to exist as real markers - named, filterable, exported downstream - they have to arrive as a file, in a format the editor recognises.
None of the major editors import a plain list like that directly. Each wants its own format:
- DaVinci Resolve takes markers from an EDL, through Timelines, then Import, then Timeline Markers from EDL.
- Premiere Pro takes them through a Final Cut 7 XML file, imported like any other asset.
- Final Cut Pro takes FCPXML, Apple’s own interchange format.
A free marker converter will turn a column of timestamps into any of those in a few seconds. Drop in the .txt, pick the target format, import the result into the timeline. The labels survive the trip, so the markers land named instead of as anonymous dots.
That last part matters more than it sounds. An editor who can see a marker labelled Sponsor Read at 00:58 finds it in a second. A timeline holding forty unlabelled markers is barely better than no markers at all.
Sending the same list to YouTube
If the video is going straight to YouTube, the description takes the timestamps as they are. YouTube’s rules are strict and short:
- The first timestamp has to be 00:00.
- You need at least three.
- Each chapter has to run at least ten seconds.
- One timestamp per line, with a title after it.
AnyMarker’s file already opens at 00:00:00 - Recording Start, so the list clears the first rule untouched. Paste it in, tidy the titles, and the chapter bar appears. The same list is what you hand to a human editor, which is why it is worth keeping the file even when the chapters are already embedded.
Keeping the file around
By default AnyMarker leaves the .txt in place after it embeds the chapters, so nothing is lost. If you would rather it cleaned up after itself, Settings → Chapter Embedding → Keep .txt File After Embed has a Delete option. Keep is the default, and the one to leave alone when an editor is waiting on the other end.
If the file goes missing, or a session crashed before the recording finalized, manual embed still works. Expand Embed Chapters in the dock, point it at the video and its matching .txt with Choose Video and Choose Markers, then hit Embed. It doesn’t have to be from the current session, so an older recording is fair game.
If you have not recorded anything yet, the guide to adding chapters in OBS covers the marking side, and the user guide covers presets and embedding settings.
The video is for watching. The .txt is for working. Send both, and the conversation about where the good parts are stops happening.
AnyMarker is free for seven days - full app, no credit card. Mark a session, open the .txt, and see what the handoff looks like before you buy it.