Thursday, January 18, 2007

CGTalk - Organization and Naming Schemes

Handling video editing projects can become very confusing and difficult if the director does not plan how they are going to organize their project files. David Edmondson, a.k.a. ThreeHams, posted a detailed explanation of how he organizes his files on his computer as he's working on them.

I've noticed something isn't really talked about all that much - organization of files during a project. When you're struggling to meet a deadline at the eleventh hour, you'll realize just how worthwhile all the preparation really is - no overwriting vital files, no searching for files, no duplicate names in subfolders, no -FINAL04.max suffixes. Everything is exactly where you expect it to be, and everything (basically) works exactly the way you want.

Sounds like advice we could all use, right? He continues...

What I'd like to see is how other people organize their projects. My scheme started out much uglier and looser than this, and eventually developed over time as I learned how to fix problems I was having. It's very streamlined for the projects I do - about 14-15 minutes of rendered footage, quick rendering times on two computers, lots of external references, and 25-30 minutes with stillframes after editing. The destination is a run of CDs and DVDs.

Want more tips and discussion like this one? Visit CGTalk @ cgsociety.org.

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