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If you’ve ever searched on a bittorrent search engine for a tv programme, you’ll notice their filenames are always in a certain format.
Part of the reason for this, is that programs like TvShows, ted (Torrent Episode Downloader),
and others rely upon standardized filenames to find and automatically download these torrents as soon as they’re released.
What the uploaders and programmers understand very well is that a strongly standardized filenaming convention makes
searching for these files and recognizing when they have been released significantly easier for the software.
Let’s say you are looking for the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica. The latest file is Battlestar.Galactica.S04E04.Escape.Velocity.HDTV.XviD-FQM.[VTV]
As all episodic torrents use a very similar filenaming convention to identify the exact episode of a particular series,
the software only needs to find “battlestar galactica” followed by S(number)E(number).
Once it has ascertained that this is the latest episode by checking that the Season and Episode numbers are indeed the latest available,
it recognizes it as the latest file and downloads it.
As you can see in the above filename even information such as the
Episode Name, Resolution, Compression Codec, Compression Profile and the encoding group is contained in the filename.
In turn, this can be used to our advantage as content creators to organize the vast amount of files we have to deal with in our work.
This allows us to take advantage of spotlight and FCP’s find function in the bins and timeline.
Example
This is an example of a filenaming convention I enforced on my assistants and PAs for a video game review series.
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Filenames will be in this format.
Game-S[season #]E[episode #]-[Game name]-[Type of footage]-[Shot #]-[description]
Filenames should always use leading zeros. eg (EP01 NOT EP1)
For example
Game-S02E04-Rock Band-Gameplay-05-Drum Tutorial (Say it ain’t so)
Game-S02E09-MGS4-Interview-08-Matt Jones talks about engine
Game-S02E14-Halo4-B roll-13-Master Chief mascot at E3
TYPES OF FOOTAGE
Essentially the types of footage depend on the nature of the segment.
For Reviews the types of footage are
1. Gameplay
2. Music
3. SFX
4. Commentary (only for sports games)
5. VO
For Interviews, they are
1. B roll
2. Interview
3. VO
SHOT NUMBER
The numbers before the description eg(05-Drum Tutorial in the above example) are not as important for interviews captured from tape
as I can refer to timecode on the tape to see the sequence of events.
The reason I need it for gameplay or any footage we capture wild without timecode/device control is so I know the sequence of gameplay
rather than trying to guess if COD5-snow stage is before or after COD5-Helicopter stage.
If the files are
Game-S02E15-COD5-06-Snow Stage
Game-S02E15-COD5-12-Helicopter Stage
I don’t need to guess.
MULTIPLE SEGMENTS WITH SAME GAME
If we are doing multiple segments on the same game over an episode,
we will give the individual segments names and label it into the Game name.
Game-S02E21-Halo4 History-Gameplay-04-Halo3 FMV
Game-S02E21-Halo4 Technology-Interview-Jonty Barnes on new co-op features.
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Rationale
We have become very used to organizing our files in context using folders.
However, when you take these files out of the directory structure,
their filenames are not useful and do not help you identify
which project they are from or indeed what types of files they are.
With organized filenames, you can use spotlight to search your media drives without having to sift through hundreds of false positives.
(instead of searching for “VO”, you can look for Game-S02E45-VO, and not have to scroll through every other VO you’ve ever ingested.)
This is most evident when you media-manage a project in FCP,
and your painstakingly created bin structure is lost as all linked media files are placed in a single bin with a flat directory structure.
Also, finding all the files in a project is significantly easier.
If I wanted to find only the B Roll footage of Rockband in for example, it’s just
| Command |
Action |
| cmd-4 | Browser Window |
| cmd-shift-a | deselect, this forces the search to commence from the top, otherwise it searches starting from the selected file |
| cmd f | find |
| enter in search field “Rockband-B Roll” | |
| find all |
This finds all Rockband B Roll but excludes the interviews, VO, etc.
This applies for any type of footage if the filenames are standardized for this in mind.
Playing Nicely with others
Why don’t I use the comments/labelling in FCP to make these distinctions in the types of files?
Files are often transferred to other departments like graphics or audio and sent back to us when the work on them is done.
So all the metadata and comments that we add in FCP to a ingested or imported file may or may not be interpreted by the software that your audio post house or graphics department uses.
In addition, naming these files makes it easy for them to find and forces them to conform to your filenaming system.
For example, you may send your audio-post house a file for a job you’re doing for a bank, let’s say ABN Amro.
They might send the file back as “ABN Amro Project FINAL AudioMix.aiff”, especially if they’ve only ever done one mix for an ABN AMRO project.
But what happens if you have more than one job for the same client?
If you send the file as “ABN Amro-TVC-CashFast Credit Banking-Final Online”, your audio-post house is more likely to use an adaptation of that filename like
“ABN Amro-TVC-CashFast Credit Banking-Final Online with AudioMixDown” and it won’t get mixed up with your ABN Amro Corporate Video.
Creating templates
Having these standardized filenames becomes very useful when you deal with an episodic series.
As each episode progresses, some creative decisions may be taken that will be maintained throughout the remainder of the series.
These then have to be updated into the template project so all future episodes follow this standard.
But it’s a pain to have to make changes to your current episode while updating a template project to reflect these changes in the future.
Take heart, there is an easier way.
Look out for more on how you can use the power of standardized filenames to easily maintain episodic templates
in my next article “Be replaceable, have a life.”
In that article, I’ll go in detail about steps you can take to hand over a job to another editor with minimal fuss
and how you can help him get up to speed as fast you can can walk out the door.
