Home Video Collection - splitting & saving - Advice please :-)

[stevent45593581]

Hiya

I have a 30 year collection of video files in MP4/AVI ripped from camcorder tapes. There are around 45 files containing 60-70 hours of video. The files are quite large being between 2-10gb. Each individual video file is mostly collections of family video clips from the same year (although some span a few years)

My aim is to create an output in time sequence of the best clips. This will likely result in producing 5-6 videos of around an hours length...maybe more. I have a very basic understanding of Premier Pro but have not tried to use it to organise a large collection before.

My initial idea was to run through all the videos individually in sequence and "cut" the best clips out saving them to local "year" directories on my PC  eg 1992, 1992, 1994 etc etc A second "pass" would then be used to recombine the clips in sequence and save the final files depending on how much output I had to process eg 1992to1994.MP4, 1995to1998.MP4 etc etc

I'd be grateful for any shortcuts on how to do this and whether this "Two pass" approach is the best way to do things. Also, any advice on breaking a video into clips quickly and easily would also be appreciated. I have looked at a couple of YouTube videos but one suggested "subclips" & the other "subsequences" - so ended up confusing myself. I'm sure I'm not the first person to undertake this sort of project and guess some people may have some very neat solutions. I do understand I will have many hours running through videos but am quite looking forwards to this!

NB I have a reasonable powerful PC but am assuming it would not be wise (possible) to import all the videos at once into Adobe Premier?

Thanks in advance for any tips or pointers to tutorials?

Cheers

Steve

[rodneyb56060189]

sounds like a good plan to me.

the amount of 'stuff' you have is more a question of your hard drives ( or SSD's)  having room on it and good seek/write speed) than loading stuff into PPro. PPro just 'points' to the files. you aren't actually loading those files into the program itself. So that's a hardware thing ( drives, cpu, etc.) mostly.

I would import your stuff into bins labeled according to year. Then use source monitor to scrub through each file and use in out points to make subclips and name the subclips so you know what they are ( eg. 1992-summer vacation). After scrubbing through a year of stuff and making subclips put that year into a sequence and name the sequence ( 1992 ). At some point you will probably make a bin for all your sequences so naming them is cool.

When in sequence ( timeline) do your fine editing with audio, effects, etc. and save. ( save many times during edit and save as and save as a copy ).  Then after you do this to all your years, decide what years you want to combine to make your exports, as you mentioned.

have fun !  should be cool for family !

[stevent45593581]

Hi Rodney

Thanks for the excellent and quick reply and pleased I had the right idea.

A few new concepts for me to Google and read up on - namely "bins" and "source monitor" - or are these just Premier names for things I already use? Are "subclips" and "subsequences" the same thing?

In any case I will do some reading and come back

Thanks for your help

Cheers

Steve

[rodneyb56060189]

yeah, I was sorta talking about PPro. Other editing programs also use bins and stuff, but since this is adobe forum I was just yappin about PPro.

[stevent45593581]

Yes, of course........ I do use Ppro - just not so familiar with the lingo   🙂

I will be far more of an expert after this exercise!

Many thanks again

[rodneyb56060189]

Yeah. You're basically putting a 30 year source of material into a documentary sorta format, with timeline re: events, audio ( music and voice over, titles, effects, and anything you dream up along the way). How cool is THAT ? !

[rodneyb56060189]

If you really wanna go nuts, shoot a family dinner holiday with some new digital camera thing... like thanksgiving or xmas or something... and use 'hold frame' on various peoples, and do flash backs to when they were growing up, interacting with grandmothers and grandfathers ( some of whom may be gone now), and make it more of a "STORY" that bridges recent stuff with the past history.

Basically, write a script for it.

[rodneyb56060189]

after the fact. do the source stuff first. see what you got after all the editing of source.. then let it sink in, how you might bring it up to date and relevant and 'interesting' to the whole family (especially younger people), so it's sorta a 'story' with compassion, humor, love, etc.