Dive Into Your Imagination

Before you start to capture, do yourself a favor and create a bunch of bins in your project file. You know what you shot, or at least you remember most of it, right? So create Bins – essentially folders – to organize different subject matter. It’s a piece of cake: a simple Apple+B keystroke. Even Bins within Bins; it’s going to help you find the material you want much quicker than if it’s just left to hide amongst all the other clips in your media list.

 

For a recent project I did in Australia, this is a sample of what my Bins looked like:

 

BOAT

Rooms

Crew

In-water/working

Interviews

Dive Deck

Meals

General Topside

DIVERS

In-Water

Suiting Up/Jumping In

Relaxing

Interviews

MARINE LIFE

Big Stuff

Invertebrates

Lobsters/Crabs

Coral

General Fish

GENERAL SCENIC SHOTS

In-Water

Topside

It may seem like a lot of “drawers,” but if you know exactly where you’re looking for something it’s no extra work at all. After all – you know where you keep your own socks, don’t you?

Remember – As you capture clips from each tape, label and tag each one – is it a shark? Is a diver in the shot?< Is this shot of coral more a transitional shot or a nice scenic, standalone clip? You’ll know. As soon as you’re done capturing from each tape, immediately put those clips into their respective bins.

An example of that might be a decent shot of a reef shark that was part of a 20-minute shoot that includes a lot of different sharks. I might call the shot of the animal swimming right on the edge of the wall – the third or fourth time I’d shot it in that scenario – something like this:

Reef Shark Over Wall ANGLE 3 (MEDIUM)

This has had a very interesting side benefit for me, too. As I’ve catalogued the different shots during a week’s shooting, by day two or three I can tell what it is I need to really focus on getting when I see that some bins are much fuller than others. Helps you organize better, helps keep you on track in terms of getting the shots you need.

When the project is over and you’ve used the best stuff, it’s going to be easy to go back into your Capture Scratch folder and pull out the clips by name that you want to store for future projects. My suggestion in this area is to create a new folder on your hard drive (hopefully you’re using externals) called Stock or Best Clips or something of that nature. Now, it’s simply a matter of making a list of the clips you want to keep, finding them in your project’s Capture Scratch folder and dragging them over into the new Stock folder for storage. You’re free at this point to delete al the rest of the media left over. Myself, I’d probably dump the entire Capture Scratch folder for that project.

NOTE: Don’t ever delete the Project File itself! Project Files are tiny, just a few hundred kb if they’re big and they simply serve as pointers to the rest of the media being used to create the movie. There’s no reason to delete this! Someday you may want to go back and work on that movie and without that initial roadmap, you’ll be starting from complete scratch. So hang onto it – even Coppola eventually went back and recut Apocalypse Now…

Staying organized from the very beginning means staying on target until the very end. Congrats!

-Aaron Falls

Apple Expert

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