Name your media files

Most video cameras use a incremental nameing for the files, eg. C0001.MOV, but this is not a good approch when doing medium size or large assignments or projects. If you have several clips with same name, e.g. C0002.MOV, will it be hard to separate clips from different memorycards.

The first principle is therefore that each file should have a unique filenames, at least for the assignment. 

The second pronciple is, if you film using a script, you should at least be able to identify clips by date, camera, scene, shot and take. If you also know location, have notes from the shot and circle take, even better.

We can use at least different approaches to solve this issue and we use two of them.

 
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use original filename

This is a common method, but I don't recommend this approach for assignments where you have more than one camera and/or one memory card,

 
 
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Descriptive filename

Rename each file based on project, scene, shot and take as slated on set.

The benefit with this is that it works for all NLE's.

The downside of this approach is that you have to manually rename each file and other information from the shot notes will not be captured. The NLE could neither sort the clips in other ways than filename or date.

 
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UNIQUE FILENAME anD METADATA

This is a multistep workflow, where the first step is to rename each file so you have a unique filename across all media. This name is not descriptive and all information is therefore in the metadata.

The next steps is to use metadata and timecode from different recording devices to add scene, shot, take and other information to each clip.

The benefit with this workflow is that all naming is done automatically, and thus really fast when you have lots of footage.

The downside is you need timecode and electronic slates to match clips from majority of videocameras.

However, this is our normal workflow for video recording due to time savings when ingesting and sync video and audio in FCP/X.

 

Descriptive filename and metadata

This is a combination of the above workflows with a descriptive filname and metadata.

The downside is that each recording device must be able to handle scene, shot and take as metadata to create i filename, e.g. Atomos Ninja 2 or Zoom F8.

This is our normal workflow for sound recording.