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Asset Management

Lesson 20 from: Creating a Video From Start to Finish

Victor Ha

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Lesson Info

20. Asset Management

Organizing footage saves time and helps you get a jump start on that edit -- but the organization doesn't have to be elaborate. Learn how to manage the assets for your film project.
Next Lesson: Edit Setup

Lesson Info

Asset Management

Let's talk about asset management. You mentioned that, you know, you're afraid about labeling and organizing footage and this and that and the other thing. So, I will tell you, I don't have the patience for asset management. I could probably do it a lot better. But what I do do is I always, always organize my footage at least into the cameras and into the segments, m'kay. Meaning, the interview, B roll, m'kay. And I'll show you my file structure, it's really simple. If you guys just do that, if you just organize your footage into interview, camera one, camera two, you're gonna give yourself so much wiggle room because when you look for a piece of footage, you'll at least know where it's gonna be, either in camera one or in camera two. And then you're not gonna feel, wade through a bunch of weird file names and you're not gonna wade through a bunch of clips that's gonna make your, make you not want to edit. I think what the first thing people do is they look at all the clips and they sa...

y, "I, I can't, there no, I'm done." (audience laughing) Right? You hit a brick wall, you hit a brick wall. But what you really, what you have to realize is that we're photographers, right, we always have an image bank of how, of what we did. I can think back some shoots and go, "Oh yeah, "I know the image I took before this one "and I know the image I took after that one." Right? If you guys think about all the things you photograph you can always think of one image, think of the shoot, and think of the image before and the image after. Or, in some way, think of the sequence of images that got you to the one you liked in that shoot. We all think like that, in one way, shape, or form or another. So take the way you think about your photographs and apply that to the way you think about footage. Just as you shoot mentally check, oh, I really like that shot and then think about the moment before and the moment after. The thing about footage is it's on-going, right? And it's on-going but if you remember the specific moments, just mentally check, I'm not saying, you don't even have to on your shoot take a note. Just on your shoot, remember it and then when you see it again as you review your footage, you're gonna be like, "Oh yeah, I remember that." Just be present, remember, immediacy, be present. Don't so, be so concerned about other things that you're not paying attention to what you're capturing. That way, when you actually review your daily's, it's gonna be the second time that that triggers a memory. Okay, go slow. So when I talk about asset management, I'm gonna do organization, we're gonna, you gotta learn how to do it and you gotta, learn how to do it in your own way, right? But there has to be some sense to it because at some point the next three really come into play. At some point you're probably gonna shoot one or two or more than one client profile, right. And you're gonna stack up a lot of editing and at some point hopefully, you're gonna be able to hire someone or contract out for an editor, and that editor also wants to make a living. And that editor is going to charge you, is going to bill you for organizing your footage if you don't organize it. For giving you, if you give them just a hard drive of stuff, they're gonna charge you for all that, m'kay. So, hopefully, what you're gonna do here is you're gonna start to learn how to organize your footage in a way that when you start contracting out and you start doing things on a bigger scale, you're gonna be able to get much more back from the people you contract to. Does that make sense? I'm not saying today, that you have to go in and label every piece of footage. I think that, that's unreasonable. It's unreasonable for me to ask you to do that because what I want you to do is start editing. And then go back and learn the tagging, the labeling of the footage. I want you to get into an editor first because so many of us stop the minute we see footage because we get so scared. But think about it, the last time I photographed a wedding was a number of years ago. But when we got back we had something like 4,000 images. You guys already do it. (audience laughing) 4,000 images and you can't tell me that you can edit down 4,000 to 200 images that you deliver as proofs? Come on, that's a load a, come on guys. I got a question. For images, like, you're able to call them so you have like, you can star them and then have it, is there a way to like star your footage so you can only? Yeah, you can star your footage, you can mark your footage, there's markers. You can drag them into bins you know, like it depends on how your work flow is. When I'm going through footage, right, inside of Premiere as I'm organizing footage, you can create bins, m'kay. And a bin is a, is a non-destructive way of organizing footage inside of Premiere. So, I can put bins and I can go, okay, this is great, this is not so great, this is uh, you know. I don't like to try to go like, like star rating because I'm not in that mindset right. So I can drag things into like a bin that says great, not so great, meh, you know. And just kinda go and drag stuff in. And that's a way you can start to organize your footage. So it, it's just, when you start big, n'kay, your funnel's gonna be really, really big at the top. You don't wanna try to get your funnel to be a very narrow at the beginning. You just wanna get your head around all the footage. Get a good, it's like walking into a kitchen and just smelling all the smells before you realize what's being cooked, m'kay. You just wanna get a feeling for what the flavor of everything is. Don't spend a lot of time like, getting into the weeds just yet. You just wanna feel what the footage looks like, scrub through it, maybe mark it down or throw it into a bin. Scrub through it, mark it down, get it into a bin. You know, just kind of look through your footage. Organize in your head, maybe take some notes. Get your files down, okay. There's different ways and different processes for different people, m'kay. I've seen people take notes, I've seen people do bins, I've seen people mark footage. All of it's working, all of it's good. Do what for you guys is gonna get you to the timeline quickest, alright? So, when you guys actually asset manage, so per job, like this hard drive I actually bought for the shoot. It's a terabyte, it cost me like $140 bucks. So as you guys work on projects, just realize that hard drives and cards are cheap m'kay. Don't, don't don't try to reuse hard drives because eventually what's gonna happen is you're gonna have a stack of hard drives that are dedicated to projects that have all the raw footage. So it's kind of like, off-site back up and then you'll have stuff in other places, right. So you're always gonna go back and I think this shoot in total will be about 500 gigs, okay, 4K, right, all the editing all the rendering files, round tripping through DaVinci, I mean. You're gonna, it's gonna need a lot of space, m'kay. We're at the point kind of in technology where we can kind of pick up hard drives as we go, and as you guys start to bill out for it, you're gonna work that price of the hard drive into your rates so you're not outta pocket all the time on these things. One thing I didn't mention here is that I try to buy the biggest capacity cards as possible. I'm at like 128 gig cards right now and I'll show you why that's so important because you can keep rolling with these cameras now, whereas before we used to have 12 minute clip limits. And you would haves so many clips like over the course of an interview. Now that you can record one clip, just let the camera roll because it makes editing so much easier, especially for us. It makes getting things to a timeline and looking at it so much easier. And then when you clean up your timeline, that becomes something that is just, oh it makes so much sense. Now you can actually look at an edit, alright. We're gonna edit so much differently than other people I think because what we like to is we like, I think photographers like to see the full picture and then we like to come in and focus on the things. And so, that's how we're gonna look at editing today, okay. Now, this is kind of like a must have and then a nicety. If you can name your folders, that would be ideal. Camera One, Camera Two, mark four DJI, you know. Something like that. The file, if you can rename your file as you're reviewing, if you wee something really awesome just like star it or something. Or in the file name put, like, great shot or look for or put the time code, alright. Think of ways that fit into your work flow as you review footage that it's gonna help you, just at a glance look at things. I remember before there was Light Room, there was Bridge, right. And before there was Bridge, there was just like Finder or these things that you had that just had thumbnails. Some of them we were going in, the only way to market a file in Finder was to like enter and like mark with like a number or a hyphen and something about the image. So you could go back ,and look at it, right? And so I know that you guys are resourceful, and I know that we've all been there before, don't let the fact that oh, the tools inside are not familiar for you. Lean on what you know and then make what you know become what, what you're gonna do. Alright, now this one is huge, okay and I put that in there specifically because a lot of times people will edit in Premiere and they'll save their project file inside of the project folder, INSE on their desktop, m'kay. Or inside their applications or in their documents where the adobe folder is. What ends up happening there is if you disconnect the hard drive and then store it and then, you know, you go away for a few weeks. You come back and you try to find that project file. It may be gone, you may forget where you put it. You may have been workin' on some other stuff, It may've just be missing. So get in the habit, if you have a hard drive that you've dedicated for the project, save that project file to the hard drive. And we'll go through all this, I just wanna go through some of these slides and then we'll jump onto my computer and actually take a look at how I do all this stuff, okay?

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Interview Questions
5 Rules to B Roll

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Ratings and Reviews

Cheryl Winkles
 

You're awesome, I learnt a lot from you, this is like a must-have first course for anyone who wants to step into video or filmmaking world. Highly recommended and thank you a million Victor Ha.

a Creativelive Student
 

Fantastic course, Victor is one of the finest instructors I have encountered. Great stuff, I would highly recommend this for anyone who wants to work in video

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