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Renaming video files on ingest
I suppose this isn’t technically a Premiere-specific question, more of a workflow question within the Adobe/Premiere ecosystem.
After a day of shooting I end up with a bunch of serialized filenames from my camera (ie files like MVI1050.MP4).
Obviously I’d like more descriptive filenames than that both for this project and in the future, I can search my filesystem for shots of a certain subject across all my old projects.
My approach was always to use Adobe Bridge to preview each video file and see what it is, then rename the file from Bridge. On Mac, this works fine. But now that I’m on Windows, if I preview the video file, it seems the system locks the file so I can’t rename it. I get “The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.”
Bridge on Windows only lets me rename files that I don’t preview and judge by their thumbnail. Once I’ve previewed the file it’s “used by another process” for at least the next few minutes.
Firstly, does anyone have any workarounds for this particular issue?
Secondly, what is YOUR approach for renaming ingested footage? Perhaps there’s a better workflow that I’m totally unaware of.
Thanks in advance for any ideas. Cheers!
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7 Replies
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I work mostly in professional workflows where the number one rule is: DO NOT RENAME CAMERA ORIGINALS.
There is an exception if the camera doesn’t name the files in a unique way where it will become a problem during online conforming.
If I had so much stuff I’d need to put them in some DAM software I would just add keywords in there instead of modifying the file itself.
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I don’t rename on ingest, but do so once within my Premiere project bin if necessary, and even then the original file name will be kept – for example MV11050 might become MV11050talk1.
For my Sony camcorders, which label everything C001 etc, whether it’s different cameras or different cards same camera, it’s a must to rename, but within a project only.
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Thanks for the replies, out of curiosity, if you don’t rename the files from the camera, how do you search for footage months, years later?
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There are some decent DAM options out there not sure if any are cheap.
You can add a meta tag to the clip.
I work mostly in a RED eco system so I use REDCINE for tagging and other cheap options like Google Docs.
And yes, you do not ever rename a clip.
I know in the DSLR world clients tend to do this since they dont set their cameras correctly for file naming (never the same name) so they think its fun to just rename it all.
Ive had to deal with so many docs with renamed files it was maddening.
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Thanks for your insights. After consulting with a few other professionals in the industry, it seems Media Silo is the one most places use, but it costs hundreds of dollars a month and is really more for a shop and not a one-man-band.
Adobe doesn’t seem to make anything that does this. Does anyone have any suggestions for software to search and manage terabytes of video files in various codecs? My only requirement is it must have drag-and-drop capability for quick use in Premiere and AE.
This actually might be worth making a new thread about.
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In my work flow- which is primarily corporate or personal events, it’s rarely necessary once a project is finished to access the footage again – but, all of my footage and project files are saved off-line, and I can re-import and reopen if needed.
I think when I do need to revisit older work, it’s more the final, or almost final masters I’m interested in, not the camera files.
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ya kinda gotta live by the rules your software sets. You can bang your head against the wall trying to adapt the software to your previous workflow, but often that’s a waste of time. And as long as you don’t screw with the immediate folder structure of your media, it shouldn’t be an issue to relink if necessary. Gotta say the relinking workflow in premiere is pretty robust (compared to fcp1-7, which could be a nightmare in a complex project until you got your head around how the program worked). Here’s how I handle this issue. When I get back from a shoot or receive cards or drives, I create a folder on my media drive for the jobname and within that folder I create subfolders with a path indicating date/and camera id (camera 1 – chip1, or name of camera model if it’s unique to the shoot). I then usually clone my media drive (using carbon copy cloner on the mac – always do this end of the job on the mac even when I’m editing in windows) to a drive with the same drive name as the media drive but with an X appended to the drive name (you don’t want to be working with more than one drive with the same name). I can then do an incremental update to my cloned media drive when and if more camera original comes in. If I’m working from more than one location, I just remove the X from the duplicate media drive at the second location. works great although there can sometimes be some outlying files that need reconnecting if I’m moving between windows and mac (I use a utility on windows that allows it to read macosextended drives).
If and when I need to relink, the relink function in Premiere shows the original path so it’s very easy to identify the containing folder, relink one file and usually, all the rest relink automatically. FCP1 -7 had a great function to change the file name to match the clip name so I was at sea for a while when migrating to Premiere but once I adapted my workflow I haven’t had any issues in the 6 or 7 years I’ve been working in Premiere
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