How to Stay Organized for Smoother Video Editing Workflow

When you’re working on a video editing project, you would not only need the video footage you capture from your digital video camera.

You would want to gather still images, music files and even stock footage. You may have to transfer these files from other sources like CD-ROM, flash drive or even external hard drive.

Once you bring them into your computer, you would want to think of a way to store them in such a way that you could easily locate them. Yes, you may need to reuse them for other projects or when continuing with your video editing project after a hiatus.

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If you have files lying around everywhere in your hard drive, which you would need for your video editing project, you would first have to organize them. Create a main folder with your project name. Then create more folders within it for audio, video, images, stock footage and even text files containing your notes.

Be prepared to spend some time locating files lying in forgotten folders or directories. Time spent organizing your files now will pay dividends later, especially if you’re working on a long-term project.

Is your video editing computer a multi-purpose machine chock-full with all types of programs from games to photo editing software? Do you store a lot of `useful’ files for future use?

It’s time to do a little housekeeping and weed out redundant programs or files to free up precious hard disk space for your video editing.

The first thing you should do is look for folders containing video files. It could be folders where you have stored DV footage captured for a previous project and forgotten all about it. Decide whether you should back them up or permanently delete them

Have you ripped your DVD movies and stored them as XviD or DivX files? Each movie could take up from 600 to 700MB of hard disk space.

You could also check out your music files. Usually, they don’t consume much space. However, if you have them in the hundreds, then they could be gobbling up a considerable amount of hard disk space.

You could also do well to uninstall programs you seldom use or plan to use some time in the future. These may not free up that much space, but there are programs which could take up gigabytes of space together with their data files.

If you have finished a video editing project for a client, and if you expect some changes to be asked in future, back up the project.

But if you’ve just edited your holiday video and made a DVD out of it, you should delete the files soon after you finish editing. This will prevent accumulation of unneeded files in your computer.

You could thrash such files, but before that identify files you may need for other projects – clip art, theme music, stock footage and the like. Keep them in a separate folder, preferably in a drive that doesn’t house your operating system.