Organization is the key to a speedy, efficient and enjoyable edit. You know it, I know it. Every click, every drag of the mouse wastes time, and you certainly don't need to constantly waste your time and your client's money searching for a clip that should be at your fingertips. The time you waste hunting for footage is better spent tweaking and experimenting creatively. Proper labeling and placement of your material means you'll be able to retrieve it quicker. Knowing where a clip is at any given moment lets you achieve great speed and meet deadlines others will perceive as impossible. So let's dispense with every extra mouse click. Let's cut out the needless hunting. Let's minimize every repetitive gesture. Let's talk organization.

Establishing a Routine

I have three tips I want to impress upon you with this article that will make your postproduction life easier. The first, and most obvious is that you should be ordering every aspect of your business from the top down in a similar fashion. Ideally you want every project laid out identically, every type of material in the same place in every project, and every clip named and referenced in a like-minded fashion. This way, you can always draw on material from previous edits at a moment's notice, and will be able to recall exact tapes or clips even if you don't remember any of the specific information about it.

 We all know that every editing project has more attributes to it than just footage. This is where organization must start. Before I create a project in my edit system, I create a supporting folder on my desktop. I like to label it the same as the project name, with a "_files" extension at the end. Inside this folder is put everything from scripts to image files, budgets to backups. Anything relating to this project that does not come from a source tape is kept here. This way, if I ever need to recreate the project in the future, I need only copy that one folder back to my desktop.

Beyond the A to Z

The second trick is going to sound rather overboard at first, but stick with me. As you'll see later, when combined with the above it will come in handy over and over again.

 So we all know editing programs allow you to sort everything alphabetically. In fact, they do this by default. However, it is a convenient, but limited organizing philosophy and you should know how to circumvent it. Why should you have to scan through to the middle of your bins to find, say, your "media" bin if it's the one you open and close most often? But how can you move it without renaming it?

Your computer assigns a numerical value to each letter of the alphabet. When you ask it to sort, it simply looks for the lowest number and lists that item first. What you may not know is that the symbols on a keyboard all have values assigned to them as well. Further, some have lower values than the letter "A", and others have higher values than "Z". The tilde for example, (~) is a symbol I often use to make any entry jump to the bottom of an ordered list. It also has the added benefit of making the entry stand out from everything around it.

Be warned that your system will not allow every symbol to be used. The question mark for example is a reserved character on most platforms (used for searching) and you will likely not be allowed to use it in a bin, folder or project name. You should experiment to find the symbols that work for you.