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Best practices for running an edit system – what are yours?
I’m running an edit workshop and training some newer assistants right now and this got me thinking. There are a lot of things that I’ve learned over the years that I think of as universal best practices for running an edit suite, any edit suite. As with anything, I’m sure these aren’t as universal as I think they are, so now I’m curious what everyone else thinks…
Mine:
Drives 80% full or less
Run your computer as clean as possible – install the minimum amount of software necessary to do your job
Manage your project and media files and ideally follow a file structure template
Projects on a separate drive from media (not as important as it used to be, but I still do it – and at work we use a server with designated project spaces)
Back up your main system hard drive and projects once a week
Never have only one copy of raw footage – always back up as soon as it comes in or it’s shot
Archive all projects on completion
Always do a textless master
Never have more than two video tracks unless there are graphics or effects
Segregate audio so that dialogue, music, nats and fx are on separate tracks
When ingesting, copy camera cards exactly including all metadataNow you…
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1 Reply
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NEVER do an OS or application upgrade in the middle of a project, and don’t run upgrades until you have a plan for how to revert, plus, a day or two for testing and possible repairs.
Never be the first one to jump to an upgrade. It’s the second mouse that gets the cheese. The first one is still on the phone with tech support.
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