Messy_Desktop

Seriously people…don’t let this be your desktop.

This is the desktop of a fellow editor, a co-worker at my latest job.  I will not name names, but they know who they are, and I have spoken to them about this.  This is a BIG no no.  One reason being that when I went to online the show, 8 items in the sequence were located on that desktop.  Again, big no no.

A while ago…not sure how long ago…I was confronted with an even worse looking desktop.  Picture that monitor on the left, but with about 1/3 more stuff, and then spread across THREE monitors.  That was the workstation of a good friend of mine.  I was brought in to finish an edit when he was called away for personal reasons.  Now his organization was made perfect sense to him, but I had no clue where a lot of stuff was, and I was always calling him looking for things.  And the project file was no better, very little organization…of a way that others might understand.  I myself come from a background of multiple editor situations.  Where you might have an assistant, or many, and many editors looking at the same project.  And because of that, you needed a uniform way of organizing things so that people could easily find things.  It was very common for an editor to be dropped into a show to help out for two days, then get back to what they were doing.

It was my friend’s desktop, and that project, that inspired me to make my Getting Organized with FCP tutorial DVD.  Now, this might seem like a sales pitch, and it is, sorta.  But mainly I want you to think about organizing things better.  Please try not have a desktop like I show here.  If someone else needed to work on the project for any reason, this would help them greatly.  Or if you are in a multiple editor situation, and the project needed to be worked on at another station, being well organized would help you avoid the issue of having media from your desktop or local drive in the project.

So no big sales pitch…buy the DVD if you want.  But more of a plea to please not do this, and please get SOME form of organization.  Read THIS article from the Suite Take at least…

Thank you.