-
Best Practice to rename source video files?
Hi all,
Let me start by saying I know that doing this in Bridge would be a better workflow. Unfortunately Bridge crashes when generating previews for my video files. So I’m stuck doing it in Premiere, which is the only application that can play my files at all (not even VLC!).
I’d like to rename my video files from the default camera names to describe what’s in the clip. So I open the file in the source window, then rename it in the project’s media list. Unfortunately this only changes the name within premiere, it doesn’t rename the file outright.
How can I rename files in bulk directly from Premiere?
-
4 Replies
-
I would recommend to rename your files at the OS level. If you need to automate the process it exists many software utilities depending your OS (Windows, Mac, Unix?) to help you with that task. Most editing software won’t make it easy for you to change the actual name of the files for media management reasons, unless you transcode your media or create new media.
-
Best practices on renaming source files would be: Do not rename source files. And whatever you shouldn’t do do not use special characters.
-
Thanks for the replies,
The source files need to be renamed because right now they’re all VID_0001.mp4 format and not only does that conflict with other filenames from the same project but I need to share these with other editors so descriptive filenames are required.
In terms of renaming from the OS, I’m fine with that, but I need to screen the files first to determine their contents, and Premiere is the only application that can play them (Bridge actually locks up completely just by browsing the folder). They are 8k 10-bit 4:2:2 h.265 files so they have to be proxied to even play. But once I rename them from the OS it breaks all the links in Premiere and breaks the links to the proxies too. The proxies take hours upon hours to generate so I’d rather not have to do them twice.
-
As others have mentioned, you make life harder for yourself if you spend so much time renaming clips at the OS level. However, if you intend to continue in your path, this is how I would proceed if I were you.
I’m making the assumption that your concern is just being able to identify the clips at the OS level. If so, I would suggest you import all of your clips into Premiere so that you can preview them. Organize them into bins. Then create like named folders in the OS. Re-organize your clips into the folders as you have them in the bins and then use Premiere’s ability to re-link to re-link all your clips. Once it finds one clip it should automatically find the rest of them. Of course this isn’t renaming the clips, but it does provide some way of recognizing their contents at the OS level.
However, if you truly want to rename all the clips it will take a monumental effort in one form or another. Either you will have to rename and then individually re-link to the *new* files (so much room for error following this path), because Premiere won’t see the rest of them. Or, as you allude to, after renaming you will have to re-import and re-encode all of the files.
Don’t know if it’s helpful in this case, but you can use a program called “Bulk Rename Utility” to rename your files following specific parameters. Really fast if you’re renaming isn’t very clip specific (think “Interior Day – 1, Interior Day -2; rather than Interior day with the red filter).
FWIW, I have had better luck playing very high resolution footage without proxies in Resolve than in Premiere so you could give that a shot.
Good luck!
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up