Dummies guide to organising

[Toby1970]

About six months ago my computer broke down. (Apparently it wasn't ready for windows 10). My hard drive was a gonna. Luckily I had been backing up onto an external drive so ...phew.

But I had never really organised my projects, media, renders and back ups in a formulated way. A bit bish, bash , bosh and then a lot of needless duplicates and searching.

Now 4k , proxies, and various exports are getting more common , can any one recommend a good way of organising their project and media?

[Dean_Utian · Accepted solution]

The film industry has the need for systematic approaches to organising content so we can learn a lot from them. Here's an article from 2014 that's still relevant:

Nine Steps to Organize a Video Edit - Documentary & Fiction Film

The key principles or organisation is to have a clear file structure, follow standard naming conventions and even have a document explaining your system in case it gets very big and you forget.

[Toby1970]

Thanks Dean. Very useful link. One question I have is about naming clips. Obviously the first thing I wpuld want to do is copy my clips onto a back up. But I also want to rename my clips. So the question I have is : if I lost my clips which I had renamed , could I relink the clips from the back up drive even though they had a different name?

[Dean_Utian]

Hi Toby. If say a video file became corrupted and you wanted to replace it with a backup, you could do the following:

1. Copy the backup video to the same location as the original/corrupted version and replace it - i.e. have the same name. This would be the simplest as your Premiere Project would not have to be relinked to he file.
2. Copy a newly named video to a location with your project, open in Premiere and relink. If you deleted the problematic video, Premiere would immediately ask you to locate the video.

Obviously 1 above is the easiest.

My advice for backups is don't rename your clips but you could have a unique name to the backup folder in which they are located.

[Toby1970]

Hi Dean. Many thanks for your replies.

Is there a way of arranging the timeline so the clip description is listed rather than the name? This would probably solve my issue.

[Dean_Utian]

Hi Toby,

Sorry for the delay in responding to your last question. I looked into it and then got distracted and lost track of this thread. Unfortunately, don't have a solution to your last question. From what I can see, showing the description instead of teh clip name is not possible.

Wish you all the best with your project.