How Much Of Your Raw Footage Do You Keep? How Do You Organize It?

I keep every bit of footage I record, and as soon as it comes off the card I watch it back (at 4x speed, and a bit of skimming) and decide if it's going to be used in a video. If it is, it goes on my second internal drive, if it isn't it goes straight to the external box.

As for organising the files I'm a bit over the top about it. Files get renamed to include the date and a hint of what the ride was (Commute, fun, shopping trip, etc.) if I'm just storing them, whilst footage I'm keeping gets a name reflecting why I'm keeping it and, in the case of something I want to include in a clip compilation, a rough timestamp of the 'good bit' to help when I'm editing. I did say I got a bit carried away with it!
 
I go through my raw footage at 2x-4x speed and keep a pen and notepad ready. If something interesting happens, I write the time down. Afterwards, I go through and cut short clips from the raw footage. I do this for all my raw footage. Then, if I went out to do a vlog, I take all the associated raw footage and go straight to Premier Pro and edit my vlog. The clips are then only for compilations. I keep all my raw footage, but only because I have a dedicated 1TB external that still has plenty of space left. Once it's full I'll start deleting the older stuff
 
How do you cut it?
I tried once in premier and it screwed it all up.

In the Source pane I select an "In" point about 15 seconds before the event, and then "Out" 15 seconds after. Grab it and drag it to the sequence, and export media it. It doesn't affect the original file at all, although one should be careful when making a compilation video using these clips, as you will essentially be double-rendering them and quality should drop, even if just a little
 
Learnt that double rendering thing the hard way.. first video with the virb was shocking to say the least.

 
Learnt that double rendering thing the hard way.. first video with the virb was shocking to say the least.


Luckily I use a Hero2 and I haven't really been able to notice a big difference. Especially once YT's encoding vandalises the video
 
I file 100% of it have Raw file separated by year then month then day. also save all finished movie files if space is ever needed ill probably just delete my oldest raw files month by month as space is needed
 

Winners Video

Website Supported by Ipswich SEO

Latest posts

Back
Top