Pain Free Video Editing (page 3)

Save Yourself from Catastrophes

The last tip is probably the most important one. Many of us have learned this one the hard way. A common practice for video editors that will save you a lot of time and money is to save versions of your project as you go along. Depending on your productivity and the extent of your editing, you may wish to save a new version of your project every two to four hours. Take a second, and choose "Save As" from the File menu. This will save a new version of your project file. Use a naming convention that denotes the version. For example, "Dan-Briana-Wedding-v4" would symbolize the fourth version of this project. This versioning of project files will allow you to take a step back in time if something seriously goes wrong. We've seen it all, from corrupt project files, to missing media files and out-of-sync audio. It's always nice to return to a previous version rather than starting all over from scratch or spending two days trying to undo the "un-Control-Z-able" (Control + Z is the key stroke for File> Undo). The nice thing is that project files are very small, usually just a few KBs in file size. So, having 10-15 versions won't likely take more than 1 MB. Isn't that nice?

Contributing columnist Mark Montgomery is a web content specialist and produces instructional videos for a leading web application developer.