How to Organize/Label Raw Footage/Dailies - Metadata Etc.

[Chris Lawes]

I would like for this thread to be an open discussion of different methods or advice on how to nicely organize all the raw footage from a documentary.

I have about 200 hours of footage taken in unpredictable documentary situations, live event, interviews, b-roll, etc. I am transcoding all of it to DNxHD .mov files and I need to go through and watch it all, erase the bad stuff, label what's what, take notes on good parts and parts that relate to a certain theme, etc.


Would really love to hear how you do this. Do you add notes in the metadata of the files? How? How do you organize the files in folders? What do you label them? 110512-Interview-Jane-Doe-CU-01.mov ? Etc.

Thanks for your input.
-Chris

 

[arco1]

Going through and watching all of it, labeling what's what, taking notes on good parts and parts that relate to a certain theme, etc. is a good first step. I usually capture and organize my footage in the order that it was shot and put it into folders by timeframe. So the folder might be called "Mar 2011" and a given file might have the name "Mar 7-11-take17". Finding a meaningful name for thousands of takes from hundreds of hours of footage can become a monumental task. You may be better off with a set of notes that refers to each unique scene. (You may even have taken notes during the shoot that you can now relate to each shot. While you're at it, this is the time to carefully label all your tapes or other shooting media.

Adobe Premiere (and probably other editng tools) has a 'transcribe' feature that translates the spoken words in your footage to text. You may want to see if that can be helpful to your organizing effort. You could theoretically do a text search instead of flipping through pages of notes when you need to find the footage where Julie says, "I need get two new cars." ...although I have found it to lack the accuracy to help with a very large project.

While you need to indicate those takes that are not useable, I'd be very careful about erasing any 'bad stuff." Sometimes you need a few frames from a rejected shot to help bridge a storyline or explain a particular situation.

Jim