Speaker 1: So tell me if this sounds familiar. You're working on a video project, you're editing your little heart out, and you need to go looking for that one specific piece of material that you really need, but you just can't seem to find it. Is it in this folder? Is it in this one? Is it over here? Is it somewhere, oh, in this vast endless dumping ground of random video files and photos and graphics and who knows what else? I mean, it's got to be in there somewhere, right? Right? Well, this video is about how to not have that problem. Over the time I've been working as a video editor, I've pretty much solidified my system for organizing all of my video projects and their associated material. And to be clear, we're talking about... Hang on here. We're talking about many, many, many terabytes of video projects. If I couldn't find things in here, I would be so screwed. Actually, okay, no. No, you know you have a lot when you have literally almost more hard drives than you can physically hold. So look, I know being organized is far from the most glamorous topic in the world of video editing, but it is something that you do have to get right if you want to have any hope of doing anything else well. What I'm going to show you in this video is what's been working for me for a few years now, and it'll work just as well regardless of whether you edit in Adobe Premiere like I do or if you use Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer or DaVinci Resolve or pretty much any other editing software that I'm aware of. Now, while I'm certainly not sitting here claiming that I've come up with the one folder structure to rule them all, this has certainly served me quite well and it might just work for you too. So let's get organized. So first of all, while there are probably about as many different ways of organizing video files on a hard drive as there are people and businesses who edit video, I do think there are some universal basic rules that you want to keep in mind so that your new super organized folder structure doesn't end up costing you more time than it saves you. First, you want something that's easily repeatable so that you can standardize it across all of your video projects. This makes it a lot easier to click into any project folder and not have to waste any time trying to figure out what goes where, and it makes your life way easier if, like me, you end up having to go back and reference older projects fairly often. Second, you want to make sure that your system has as few folders as possible. And what I mean here is that you want just enough folders that everything is neatly categorized, but not so many folders and subfolders and sub subfolders that it takes forever to actually click through all of them to actually access anything. And finally, you want to make sure that it groups together all of the material associated with a specific project in one spot. There is nothing worse than having the assets for one project scattered across a whole bunch of directories or even worse, a whole bunch of hard drives. Not only is it a huge pain in the butt to actually find anything, but it makes backing up your video projects, which you should definitely be doing, next to impossible. Having all of a project's files in one folder makes it much easier to keep track of it all and to move or copy whole projects from drive to drive. So basically, we want something that's easy to duplicate, doesn't have too many folders, and keeps everything in one spot. So with all that in mind, let me show you what I do. For simplicity, I'll be showing you what all this looks like on one of my archive drives. A lot of people edit off of the same drive where their footage is stored long term, so I figured demonstrating it this way would make the most sense for this video. However, if you're advanced enough to know about things like scratch drives, don't worry, I will be explaining how that factors into all of this a little bit later. So we're looking at our drive here now, and you can see starting from the root directory, I've got a few folders that might not necessarily apply to everybody. You can see for me, I split things up first of all into a few broad categories. So audio, which in my case is podcasts. Photo, which is my photography-only projects. And then finally at the bottom here, we have what we're concerned about for this video, which is, well, video. And you can see inside of video, everything is split up by year. So you can see this particular drive covers about half of 2019, and 2020 up till now. And if you were wondering, this is sorted by a release date. So say for example, if I was shooting a project in like the last week of December 2019, but it was only being either published or delivered to a client in January 2020, that project would go in 2020. So then if we go inside the year, you can see that every project gets its own folder. And this is where we start to get to the really important stuff, because each one of these folders contains all of the material that has to do with that project. So now I'm going to show you what the inside of one of these folders looks like. I'm actually going to show you, this is the last video I uploaded to this channel. This is my review of the GitHub Git 2. Go check out that video if you haven't seen it already. So you can see inside the project folder, this is what the basic structure looks like. So we have five folders and they're called assets, documents, edit data, music, and finally, raw footage. Some people will put a number before the name of each one of their folders so that they appear in File Explorer in a particular order. You can do that if you want. I just don't because honestly, I've never particularly found the need to. So each one of these folders contains a very specific kind of material. You can see the first folder here, assets, contains everything that is related to the project that I didn't capture in the real world. So that's everything from vector graphics to photos, to images from the web, to screenshots of websites, stock footage goes in here as well. And you can see I also keep my sound effects, although I didn't use very many for this project, they go in this folder as well. The next folder here is documents. Documents is all of the documents that have to do with producing the video. So you can see here we have a script, we've got a shot list, we've got the right map that I use to lay out the structure of the video before I write the script. This folder does not contain stuff like invoices or anything else that has to do with the business side of producing a commercial video. That stuff lives on a totally separate drive. This is really just documents that you're gonna use to create the video. Next up, we have edit data. And this is, again, kind of predictable. This is where all of the edit files that you use to make your final edit of your video are going to end up. So you can see in my case, that's a Premiere Pro project, an After Effects project, and all of their associated preview and scratch files. By default, these will be saved in the same folder that you put your Premiere and After Effects file in. For the sake of this video, we're just gonna say that that's okay. If you have a separate media cache folder or even a separate media cache drive, obviously you're not going to have all of these. But you should still have your edit files stored in this folder because there is a strong possibility that you're gonna want to refer back to those at some point in the future. Next up, we have music. And this one is something that not everyone will necessarily need. This obviously is all of the music tracks that I use in the final video. You might be wondering why I don't just put these in the assets folder, especially since that's where I put the sound effects. And the reason why I do it this way is because I tend to use a lot of different music tracks in a lot of my videos. You can see this one has 13, and that was just a 21, 22 minute gear review. And I find myself having to refer to this directory a lot. So I found it's a lot easier for me to just keep it all in its own folder. But again, some of this stuff will depend on how you like to work. And now last and very definitely not least, we have raw footage. And this is where all of the video files and their associated audio files get stored. Some people will have different folders for the video files and the audio files. To me, I can't really imagine a scenario in which I would want just the video clip, but not the audio clip that was recorded to go with it. And since it's pretty hard to confuse video and audio files in File Explorer, I just dump them all in the same folder. Now, some projects might require some additional subfolders inside of raw footage. For just a simple little YouTube video like this, just putting everything inside of raw footage and leaving it at that is fine. But if you're working on, say, a longer form documentary that's being shot over a much longer period of time, it might make sense to catalog the footage by, say, the date that it was shot on, or maybe even if you want to be more precise, by the date and the name of the subjects that appeared in that day's footage. So this is one area where it sort of depends on the specific project that you're working on. Another thing that I get quite often, especially if I'm getting a hard drive of footage that someone else has shot and I'm just doing the editing, is footage sorted by camera. That sort of makes sense if it's coming from a videographer. But honestly, to me as an editor, if I'm going to subdivide my footage, it makes more sense to me to do it in a way that is at least sort of structurally related to the video I'm trying to produce. Show you an example of this. This now is the raw footage folder for a documentary I produced a while ago called The Jazzmen that ended up airing on CBC that I shot with seven cameras, believe it or not. And there ended up being just under eight and a half hours of raw footage to go through to put together the final film. But you can see what I've done with all that raw footage is I've separated it based on location. And the reason I did it that way is because each one of these locations was actually its own scene. And since there wasn't any overlap between those two batches of footage, it made sense to keep them separate that way. So that's just one example of a way that you can do that that's actually useful. The last thing you want to do is go overboard on this. I have seen people for some reason subdivide their footage by date, then by camera, then by resolution, then by frame rate, then by like whether their f***ing sign conflicted with Mercury being in retrograde at the time that they shot it and what color socks they were wearing that day. Don't do that. Trust me, you want as few folders as you can get away with. It will make your life much easier, both in editing and like spiritually too. Because you'll be less mad. Because you can actually find your footage. Anyway, finally, once all the editing is done and your project is rendered out, that resulting file or files, if you have multiple versions, goes right here in the root of that project's folder for ease of access. And that's really it. This basic structure works for pretty much any video project. Although sometimes there will be cases where you don't even necessarily need all of those folders. This is an example of a project where I was just given a hard drive of footage and there were no documents associated with how I was supposed to put all that footage together. So there was no need for a documents folder. Other projects might actually need an occasional extra folder. One example of this is any video I make that's destined for YouTube. That video will need a thumbnail to upload to YouTube. And you can see in this case, I actually removed it from my example folder, but I'll bring it back in now. There is an extra folder here for the thumbnail and everything that I used to make that thumbnail. So you can see here we have the still images that I shot. We have the Photoshop document in which I actually assembled the thumbnail. And we have the final JPEG image ready for upload to YouTube. So basically it doesn't need to be like a rigid inflexible structure across every single project. But as long as you have those four or five basic folders in place, everything is going to be a lot neater and a lot easier to navigate and things will be way easier to find. So in summary, this is kind of an overview of everything we just covered. Like I said at the beginning, this is what I use for every single video project I do. And well, it hasn't steered me wrong yet. Okay, now as promised, here's some extra bonus stuff for the advanced users. So particularly if you edit heavier footage, so like 4K and up and particularly high bitrate 4K and up, you're probably working off of some kind of solid state drive, whether it's a SATA SSD like this one or a really fast NVMe drive like this WD Black that I use. The basic benefits of editing off of an SSD as opposed to a hard drive, if you don't already know, are that you get faster data transfer speeds, importing footage into your editing software is a lot faster and you get much snappier performance in your timeline while you're editing. One of the cool benefits of using a standardized folder structure like this that keeps everything to do with a project in one spot is that you can actually create that folder structure on your scratch drive, so on your SSD, do all of your editing and then when you're done with that project, you can just grab that whole folder and move all of that material over to your spinning rust archive for long-term storage. I also mentioned when I was showing you the edit data folder, all of those ugly little Premiere and After Effects scratch and preview files, when you are transferring your project off of your SSD to your archive, you can either keep those or just get rid of them. They do tend to get pretty big and Premiere and After Effects will recreate them in the future if you reopen that project again. Another way to handle this is to have a separate folder or even a whole separate drive that you can tell Premiere and After Effects to use as the destination for all of these annoying little files and then you just purge that drive or folder every so often when it starts to get too full. If you wanna learn more about this, in the process of researching this video, I actually came across this really thorough explanation of how all of that works and how to set it up if that's something you wanna do by Puget Systems. They're a custom system builder based in Washington State and they do a lot of really cool stuff. I have linked that video below. One last advanced user note is the question of recurring assets, so stuff that you reuse for multiple projects. A good example of this is the title sequence for these YouTube videos. That's obviously the same file just being reused over and over again in every single video. Well, to save yourself having to copy that same file into every single project folder, which would kind of needlessly chew up hard drive space, what you can do instead is set up a common assets folder, either on your archive drive or your network-attached storage or whatever your setup is, and just keep all of those files in there. Okay, well, I think that definitely covers it. I know that was a bit of a long ride, but I hope you got something useful out of it. And hey, maybe you even learned how to better organize your video files. For those of you who stuck around right to the end, especially those of you who edit video either semi-professionally like me or maybe even if it's your full-time job and you could benefit from saving a little bit of time here and there while you're working, here's a sneak peek of something pretty cool. Have you ever wished you could automatically generate your entire folder structure to organize your video projects with one key press? Kind of like this. Or maybe you want to call up any one of those folders out of nowhere like magic so that you never have to waste any more time clicking through File Explorer to get your material. Kind of like this. Well, obviously you can do those things. And I'll be doing another video very soon all about how you can set that up to help speed up your editing workflow using a free piece of coding software called AutoHotKey. It's going to be pretty darn awesome. So if you don't want to miss that, well, you know how YouTube works. Hit like, get subscribed, hit the little bell icon to get notified when that video and other new videos come out. And leave me a comment down below if you found this video useful or if you have other ideas for video editing related topics you'd like to see me cover on this channel. But that's all for now. Thank you very much for watching. I've been Alexander. Until next time, goodbye.