Speaker 1: Today on Pull My Focus, let's talk about managing your digital video assets, so that you don't pay for it much later.

Speaker 2: Honey, have you seen the kosher salt?

Speaker 3: Diamond crystals are mortons.

Speaker 2: Diamond, of course.

Speaker 1: Why am I a barbarian? It's on the top shelf over the sink.

Speaker 3: Babe, where are my cufflinks? The chain style, the bullet back.

Speaker 2: Bullet back?

Speaker 3: They're under your neckerchief.

Speaker 2: Babe, do you know where file D398C-MAXPRESSDEFAULT-00057.PNG is?

Speaker 3: You mean that client logo that you used six months ago?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: You downloaded it onto your desktop and dragged it right into your project.

Speaker 1: Oh crap.

Speaker 3: Maybe try looking next to your fancy salt.

Speaker 1: Welcome to Pull My Focus, Adventures in the World of Digital Filmmaking, where we bring you the inside tips on making great digital video. Editors love to edit, to see the story unfold on their timeline. This is our time to be creative. This is our time to bring the director's vision to life. It's also time, unfortunately, to get very organized, so that future you doesn't look at this project and go, what the hell was I thinking when I organized this mess? Organization is absolute key, so I'm going to give you some tips on keeping current you and future you, or whoever, not going crazy trying to figure out what the hell is everything. So the next time you're ready to start a new project, let's not just fire up our editor and hit New Project. Let's start at the basis where all the things are going to live in your file system. So we're here in the file system, and what I want to do is I want to create kind of a universal storage area that will become later my template for all the projects that are going to happen later. So we're here. I have a little folder, and it's called Example Project Structure, and it's empty. So what do you need in your project? What are you going to need in all your projects? Well, first you're going to need video. So let's create a folder called Video. Great. Inside that video folder, you may need B-Roll. Let's create B-Roll. I don't care how you spell it. You may need stock footage, so let's do stock footage, so on and so forth. Screen captures, stuff like that. Put all the bins that you generally need on a general basis. We don't want to get specific here. We just want to create a template for later. You're going to do the same thing for audio, so we're going to do audio. In audio, I'm going to do something interesting. I'm going to separate my audio bins already into four different categories. We're going to talk about sound effects, so I call it SFX. We're going to have one for dialogue. We're going to have one for music, and we're going to have one called ambient or ambient because I don't know how to pronounce ambient, for ambient sounds. I do that as a general rule because I'm going to be filling at least one of those bins, probably two on every project. So I may as well start now. Once you've got that structure set up, here I have more, the more sets out. So there's my audio. Everything's empty right now. Here is my video. I have definitely a folder called project because this is where my Premiere project is. If you want to get specific, you can actually be like Premiere projects. I have one called stills, which will hold still images of things. I may have one called graphics. I do have one called rushes. Rushes is kind of an old school term. You can also call them dailies. They're basically the raw footage that comes off of your camera. So if you're recording yourself or if you're recording your own audio, those are considered rushes. But whatever you do, name it something that you know that this stuff came from your camera, not from stock footage, not from B-roll, which may come from your camera, but put that in a B-roll area. This is your cream of the crop stuff. So work out your folder structure for your general project in your file system first before loading anything into your editor. As an example, I'll show you what our Pumar focus folder template looks like. It looks like this, and we'll give you a folder template for Premiere specifically. Check the description for the download link so you can look at it as an example. This is an example of our Pumar focus folder template. I do have another folder called AFX, which will keep our After Effects things. Here's our project for our After Effects project here. Here it renders motion graphics and graphics, stuff like that. Other things are backgrounds, which we have for our videos, closed caption files if we need them, any documents that we need to download. Our final renders, and I do want to say one thing about final renders and test renders. Test renders is whenever I want to maybe look at a segment of the video or render the whole video and just throw it up on Frame.io or something like that. These are test renders. Final renders, generally speaking, you don't want to name your project, your final output, my cool project final. Just put it in the final renders bin and name it the thing you want to name it. Try not to have final one, final two, final three. Have a final. Trust me. Future you will be happy about that. Then also fonts, graphics, what else, scripts, stills, thumbnails and stuff if you're a YouTube or a Vimeo or whatever user. Now that you have a folder structure, let's load our editor and start creating the bins for our editor. There's some things I want to do in here. They're basically exactly the same things that I did in my file system. I want to create my bins. I want to create a project that I'll be ready to work with so I don't have to do this over again. Once again, I'm looking at this structure here. Remember, you only have to do this once. This structure here. We're going to have audio, premier project. Well, we're not going to bring a project folder into our project, but we have our audio, our rushes, our stills and our video. Now, the reason you can't just drag the folder into premier, this may work with other editors, but if the folder is empty, well, it has nothing to do. It won't import anything. You could either fill those bins with things, but I would rather do this to just create them while we're here. I'm going to drag this out a little bit. Since you only have to do this once, you're good. I'm going to go new bin, audio. I'm going to change this to the list view style so I can be a little faster. Within audio, we're going to create another bin called music, a new bin called sound effects, a new bin called ambient, and one more bin called, what was it? Give it to me. Give it to me. Dialogue. Great. You're going to continue this for every single folder that you had until you have something that looks like this. This is an example of our project folder for the template for pull my focus episodes. Here we go. We have audio, and I have all my things here. In fact, I have ... They're a little more sussed out, ambient, dialogue, miscellaneous for whatever. Here's my rushes folder, and here's some legacy titling stuff. Basically, this is a starting point for awesomeness later. There may be things you want to reuse. We reuse our intro animation. We reuse some sounds, some wishes. These are things that you're going to use over and over and over and over again, so why not just put them in the project right now so you don't have to keep looking for them over and over again. What I'm going to do is I'm going to find assets. If you notice, I have assets in here already, video, PMF, common video. That would be this video here. What you would do is you would go to your folder that you created. You would go into one of your video folders, and you'd import the things you need into the folder template folder. You import them into here, and then you bring them into your editor. This is important. Get into the habit of always bringing assets into your folder structure and then into Premiere. It's very tempting to do a screenshot of something. It saves it on your desktop, then you just drag it into Premiere. Well, guess what? Six months from now, your desktop may have changed. You may be on your laptop. You may be on someone else's computer, or it may be a file you give to someone else. Your desktop is being referenced now in that project. Your desktop does not show up in their project, and then you're in trouble. Once you're done building your template, you want to do a file save. We're going to go file, save one more time so that the changes have been saved. Then we're going to go to our folder once again on the desktop. Here's our example folder structure right here, and we're going to make a zip. Most operating systems will have some way to compress the file. Windows has, I think, a built-in compressor. Mac definitely has a built-in compressor, so I'm going to come here and go compress example project structure. We make a ... compresses it down into a nice zip file. Every time I want to create a new project, I extract that zip, rename the top level, and I'm ready to go. Let's say you're bringing in something from a stock footage place. Let's use Pixabay, for example. It's a great little site, and it's got free downloadable stock footage for you to use. We use it a lot. Let's first search for a cat, so I'm just going to search for a cat. I need a picture of a cat, and here's a really nice picture of a cat. It's a Siamese cat. Click here. I'm going to click free download, and let's go download. I am not a robot. I can prove it, because these are traffic lights, because I know what a traffic light looks like. I'm going to hit download. Now it's going to bring me into, obviously, my download window. We're going to go to my folder, which I always told you to do, and we're going to go to stills, and we're going to save it as stills. But wait, wait. The file name right now is cat. G-C-E-C. What is this? Here's what you need to do with files that you bring in from external places. This is not going to help me later to be just cat. I see it's a Siamese cat. It's really tempting to get rid of all this stuff, but don't. Take the original file name, plus any IDs or anything, and either prepend or append the rest of your descriptive text. The reason you want to do this is because Pixabay uses that ID to find that file again. Remember, it has lots of cats. This is a specific ID for that cat picture, so if you ever need to grab it again, if you're on Pond5 or any of these services, they will usually have an ID embedded in the name. So what I want to do is maintain all that, and then also say, when I'm ready to save it, Siamese, pretty, I don't know, and meow. Something I guess a little more useful than that. But I'm going to add my descriptive text after their stuff. That maintains the ability for me to refine that file on Pixabay if I need to. We use a program called Kyno to do our asset management, and we've done a whole video on Kyno. You can go check that out in the channel. And Kyno allows us to put tags and descriptive metadata, and we can search for an actor, or we can search for multiple instances of actors in videos, all that great stuff. That's great. Kyno is definitely recommended if you have a lot of digital assets you need to go through. But if you use this structure, if you add your descriptive text to their IDs, you can simply use your operating system search, and it should find it. If you do a search on the top level of your project for Siamese, it will find it because it will find the word Siamese in the descriptive text. So you don't have to buy expensive asset management programs. Just use your file system. As an editor, the reality is we are creative. We are creating a great vision, but we also have to be organized. So throughout the entire process, while you're working, you're going to literally spend half your time finding things on the internet, or downloading things, or pulling in pictures and graphics and sound and stuff. Make sure you're descriptive on your file names. Make sure you're bringing them into your file structure before you bring it into your editor. Make sure all that stuff, your ducks are in a row, so later you don't hate yourself for screwing yourself over. Trust me, I've done it a couple times. So that's it for the moment. Thanks for watching. Make sure you check the description for your free download of a Premiere project that I have set up, that we set up here at Pixel Valley for you to download and use. It's Premiere, later versions of Premiere should be able to open it, so you should be able to still use it. And that's it. Stay organized, kids. See you in the next one.