How to organize your hard drive - For Filmmakers

Your Boy Niles walks you through exactly how he organizes his footage after a shoot. This helpful video will keep you organized and always make sure your footage is always where it should be.

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[moment]

How do you currently organize all your yummy footage?

[gillynova]

You don't know how long I've been trying to find a video like this.... THANK YOU GUYS

[Walaby]

Additional Tipps and some Changes to your Tipps:
1. Write Dates like this YYMMDD not with points in between. Certain programms and operating systems don‘t support points in the name.
2. Don‘t use blanks in folder or file namings. Use underscore. Again, some programms don‘t like this.
3. Don‘t use # or other special signs, rather use higher numbers or X‘s.
4. Use Numbers at the start of folders: 01_RAW, 03_SFX and so on for example. It will always keep everything organized in the right way
5. I name my Liveworks folder Assets. Since I‘ve cut a few Live events we usualy had Liverecording and Liveedit folders and that alone was kinda annoying when u where in a rush.
6. I have the Project folder next to Raw and Asset and not inside one of them. Makes it easier for other people to find.
7. Use whatever structure suits u best unless ur structure is to pile everything up... please don‘t :D

[ScottBuscemi]

Good stuff as always. I’d recommend dating folders as YYYY-MM-DD rather than putting the month first, or else you’ll regret that folder structure next year (oops)

[AmeliaHeldt]

This was EXACTLY what I was looking for! Thnaks!

[thegrindtopar]

Solid info 👊🏻👊🏻. I do the same, store everything on the external and work from it.

[thefriends]

Can't wait for you guys to make a rugged camera bag 3l

[whoschrischu]

oh shoot, they grabbed Willem!? He's everywhere now

[RobertJohnsonEYT]

If I'm doing client work the first thing I do is back up the footage on another drive
Then I sort the footage into folders by the camera I shot on
Id its multiple days I break it down into days and if its multiple shoots in a day I do it by time of day as well.
It's tedious work up front but knowing where everything is and marking it makes it easier to drag, drop, and edit

[maganatalia]

Hi! I'm a bit confused when it comes to the LIVEWORKS folder. In the video you say that you store all your collection of extra bits like Music, Soundeffects etc. in this folder and it sounded like its stuff you often reference for different projects as well. So do you move these parts from project to project or do you add those same bits to every project regardless?

[NicosPhotographyShow]

This comes at a great moment!! Thanks for this.

[AaronWeilerWork]

Great tips! An organized folder structure is the only way to work. Also, FCP X can create keyword subfolders of your organized folder structures as well, when you import the media. When/where do you back-up that ext drive, to cover yourself when that drive is lost, dropped, stolen, or crashes (as they all eventually do)? While traveling, I'll use the ChronoSync app to keep exact smart clones of my drive to another ext drive (or two) as a safety net, as well as Dropbox for the project files (if enough bandwidth while traveling). At home, I'll use ChronoSync again to make a smart clone duplicate of the project to my RAID 6 that protects me for up to 2 hard drive failures. Lots of back-ups, I know, but when you've lost work for a client or personal project, you'll be glad you made the effort. Cheers!!

[drewbdarby]

SSD master race for sure. Only use an external rotating drive for backups now.

[stAjay]

I store my project files on creative cloud or dropbox desktop apps. I can bounce between my desktop tower and laptop easily without having to connect the external drive, since my desktop has the same structure and files as my external drive.

[gillynova]

Question, do you save your files in different hard drives such as 1 in an SSD and 1 on cloud? Also, do you have recommendations on what is your guy's favorite hard drive and cloud? Thanks!

[thyalyssatran]

Since I already the date range in the project name folder, would you say it’s necessary to organize your RAW footage by specific day for multiple days? I’m just debating on whether or not this is too many folders 😭

[zariqhaiqal]

Need that desktop background on the laptop 🔥

[blackhillsfilms]

Love the idea of a sfx bed. Do you have a resource of a generic sfx bed we could see and find clips that work for us? Cheers!

[BuckBowen]

Bro, you've got to get your batch rename game up. Can't be having a bunch of random numbered names. On a Mac it's stupid simple...

Select all files > Action drop down menu > Rename > Format

[LukeAntunes]

I watched another video where they suggested after organizing the folder for a project, transfer it to the hard disk and edit/upload from there for speed purposes. It seems like you prefer to edit directly from the external drive. Any thoughts there?