One editor on the industry, the aesthetics, and her goals in finding a place in the field

Although he doesn’t update often, I do always enjoy a post on Norman Hollyn’s blog, The Editor.  I was going over his archives a little while ago while my boyfriend rode – and I’m not kidding – a dragon skeleton roller coaster through hidden world 8-7 in Super Mario Bros. Wii, when I found a post that really should be shared with you all.  It concerns a skill that Hollyn is quite right in saying most independent editors don’t have: media management.  (I’ve seen some interesting systems working with some of my clients.)

What is media management?  I’ll let Hollyn describe it:

What is media management, you may ask? It’s the ability to organize all of the footage (whether it’s picture or sound, camera-shot or visual effects created, and more) in a way that makes it easy for anyone else to find and use it. That means that original material is sorted and saved in bins and folders in a very specific way for an assistant editor who is working on a show with a lot of visual effects, but entirely differently for the editor on that show. It means creating and executing a workable system that is appropriate to the personnel and the project that you are working on. A music video should be organized differently than a commercial, which is set up differently than an action film or a television show.

I highly recommend that anyone who isn’t familiar with media management to have a look at the article.  It’s a huge skill to have, and it makes any project you take on – for yourself or another – much easier to deal with.  I know I’ve talked about how I’ve organized Issues before.  Raw footage went into folders organized by episode.  Clips were labeled with Episode number, Scene number, Angle number, and Take number.  So the first Clip was labeled Ep1Sc1A1T1 (or something to that effect), and so on.  Because the scripts were labeled in the same fashion, anyone who picked up a script and looked for a clip could find it.  And they didn’t have to troll through hundreds of clips, because each episode has a folder.  If there had been an excessive number of takes, I would have made subfolders for each scene.

That is media management.  And let me tell you, when I migrate my files to a bigger hard drive, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to reconnect all that media next time I fire up a project.  Just a further incentive, beyond the ability to get an assistant editor’s job.  😉