How do you name and describe your clips? What metadata do you use?

[Shane Ross]

I simply rely on clip name, description, source timecode, source tape name. Possibly Time of Day if that info is available.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Robert Withers]

This is not an answer to your question about metadata, but I’m interested in file naming practices and description practices. Here’s a blog post from Shane Ross that describes a workflow for a short reportage and includes a section about file organization and naming.

I’m curious about this. For a small DSLR shot, I renamed the camera files to be descriptive, instead of entering log notes as you did. I understood that Premiere keeps the camera file names in metadata, so they’re still there. This could be a little time consuming, since renaming adds a couple of steps. Is it safer to keep the original clip names, like MVI_4256.mov?

Robert Withers

Independent/personal/avant-garde cinema, New York City

[Aindreas Gallagher]

I can go mad for just colour labels even – if only because they propagate really visually into the ppro timeline. adobe have a nice colour vibrancy going there.

depending on the thing – for a corpo short-ish vid with interviewees, I might colour label the interviewees – you start to remember who purple and red is on the timeline, and it also makes the timeline look a bit more space age and reassuringly organised in general. I also tend to leave a colour just for temp scratch audio or stuff I want to remember is still knocking around on the timeline.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Jay Thomas]

This is one thing I’m currently troubleshooting in my adjustment from FCP to PP. On multiple long form docs I became dependent on using two COMMENT columns, leaving the clip name as is, adding a general category-type identifier in the first comment column (INTRVW, VERITE, or maybe a general location identifier), then a more specific identifier in the second comment column (character name, slight description etc.)

In FCP it was very easy to select a group of clips, right click one of those identifiers which would bring up a pop up list of every identifier I’d added to that column, select from that list the one I wanted to use, and then that identifier would propagate through all selected clips. In this way, groups of clips could be identified very quickly and efficiently.

I’m searching for similar functionality in PP. So far I can set up the same column structure, but propagating identifiers over multiple clips I can’t find a shortcut for, so it’s copying and pasting into each clip. This may force a different naming methodology on my, can’t quite tell yet.

If anyone knows a workaround…. many thanks! Of course I could be missing something very obvious since I’m still a PP newbie. But I offer this working methodology as an example to you of something that, in theory, could still work.