10 Ways to Edit Faster and More Efficiently – Part 1 – File Organization

Is it possible to speed up your film or video editing and become more efficient without spending truckloads of cash on the latest bleeding edge hardware? Yes. You can edit faster without spending any money. Increasing your editing efficiency can actually make you more money.

With the amount of time I spend working in non-linear editing software, I like to be as quick and precise as I can while staying creative. Speed and efficiency is important for a variety of reasons if you make a living as an editor. You’ll get more work done in a shorter time. You will be able to take on more projects. You can charge your clients more on these new projects because you get more work done in an hour or day or however you bill your clients.

This isn’t about rushing through your work, it’s about having more time to put better quality on the screen. If the technical parts of editing are second nature, it leaves more time to do the part of the job that you actually want to do. It doesn’t matter what kind of material you work on, speeding up the way you work can only be a benefit.

This series of posts will outline some of things that I do to keep up to speed and even stay ahead of the curve on fast paced jobs with tight deadlines. I work primarily in Final Cut Studio, but have recently come back to Avid Media Composer after a few years away from it, thanks to John Flowers. I also play around with Premiere Pro CS4 a little bit, but this series of tips is mostly editing platform agnostic and should apply to any software you choose. Some of it will even apply to other applications.

Part 1 – File Organization

Being organized starts at the Finder/Explorer level. If you have a messy desktop or any other catch-all or repository for random files coming in and out of your work then this is for you. If you have media offline and don’t know where it is, read on. If you need to do frequent searches to find some bit of media that belongs with a project, then you have some organization to do.

You should know the file path to anything included in an edit project that you are working on. In other words, everything needed for a project should be organized in a central location for that project. I can look at anything that I have edited in the past few years and identify the folder that contains any graphic, sound effect or music used in it. It sounds a little bit crazy or obsessive compulsive, but it’s not. If you use the same procedure for organizing all of the assets for every project that you work on this should be no problem. I use a project template directory that looks like this

I keep a copy of this template directory in each of the folders that hold my projects. I use the underscore at the beginning of the folder name to keep it at the top of the list for quick access. When I start a new project I simply right click and duplicate the template directory and rename it. But how long does it really take to make a few folders for a new project? Not long. But to be truly efficient, you’re going to want to save time everywhere you can. If you’re are messy computer user by nature, this will save you more hassles than you can imagine over time by giving you a place to put everything. If you are pretty organized to start with then this saves you just a little bit of time at the beginning of a project, but every little time saving technique adds up.

Once the project directory is set up for the new edit job, everything related to the project gets copied or moved here before importing into a project. The operative word in the previous sentence is before. This isn’t entirely necessary with Avid because of Media Composer’s rock solid media management, but I do it anyway because my Avid Media Files directory is on a RAID 0 array and I don’t trust it. And when I have a hard drive catastrophe, everything I need to rebuild the project is in one place that gets backed up daily. Everything except for the source video files or tapes of course, that’s another article entirely. This organizational procedure is the same whether I’m working in Final Cut Pro, Media Composer, or Premiere Pro. I wouldn’t even change if I were cutting in Media 100, Speed Edit, Sony Vegas, or Windows Movie Maker.

Being consistent is the key with organizing your projects. This whole organization business is most crucial when your edit is being passed on to another editor. Whether the show is getting an online, or you are collaborating with another editor on your cut. Any other editor or assistant should be able to take your project and pick up right where you left off. Your organization method should be logical and easy to understand. With everything in one place, your project becomes much more portable and will cause less headaches for you and the people you work with.

How does all of this help make you a faster, more efficient editor? Simple. If you know where a file is then you’ll never have to spend time looking for it. Find a system that works for you and stick to it. If you come across something that works better than your current system, give it a try. But for the love of all things post production, don’t go back to that messy desktop and media scattered over 6 external drives. It’s not a good way to work.

If you get as many of the left-brained activities associated with this job done in a methodical fashion then you have more time to be a right-brained creative type. Creativity, after all, is what the client is paying for when they hire you. Isn’t it?