Little Frog in High Def

Wholeheartedly agree! ‘final’ should be banned from any naming convention!

So true. I’m gotten into the habit of naming my sequences “Project-Cut#-Description of new element-MM/DD/YY. Adding the date is the key part.

Try using the unix-style date, YYYYMMDD. It takes some getting used to, but it lets you sort more easily by date.

Exporting a timeline now, labeled FINALFINALFINAL, just for you.

Final = amateur!

Professional = version + date.

“Final”-naming can be used to give a client a little insight about your feelings regarding the version your sending or viewing. ;-)

We have to use both methods in our company. With just the date we’re always asking did this version issue, is this the last version, or is the last version on some portable media? When the project is fully agreed and signed off, we add _FINAL to the delivered version and everyone then knows where the editing concluded.

Great post, Shane. I see this every once in a while from agencies who are sending me files to “fix”.

My favorite above is “IGNORE_OTHERS_USE_THIS”. I got a good laugh on that one.

I, too, add my initials to the end of my sequencing even though I’m usually the single editor or after effects artist.

force of habit.

Just a warning, that very long file names can cause problems. There is a limit (at least on windows and I’d assume on the mac also) to the number of characters in a file name (including the file path). If you bury your files in a couple of levels of folders, you can get into trouble with either file names being truncated or other weirdness. I had a client who buried files way down on a window system and managed to create a truly ugly situation where files became unreachable.

Great post, Shane…It’s scary how often I see this happen.

My way of doing this is NameofTheProject_VersionNumber. NLE’s let you see creation date so I don’t see why adding it. What I also do is have a separate bin labeled BACKUPS, and I throw all my previous versions in there so my current cut it’s by itself in a bin labeled, well, you guessed it CURRENT_CUT. I couldn’t make it any clearer.

Great post! One extra piece that I’ve added when working on long-form projects is _toDestination – that way if we get notes from the director’s friend’s wife’s daughter’s ex boyfriend who got a copy from the cousins of the organizers of a festival, we can easily figure out which version they were looking at. No more guessing which version was sent where. I use similar _SomethingHappened endings for other major changes such as Color grades, Audio mixes, etc.

Hilarious post, because I too have been there. I loved “Final_Final_ForTheLoveOfAllThatIsHolyLetThisBeTheFinalFinal”… haha, good one.

Anyway, I’ve adopted a more stripped-down and focused naming convention similar to many above, using what made sense to me. First and foremost, I find a date is a must have in everything I do, because even if you can access creation date, it’s nice to immediately see whether inside an NLE or in finder exactly what date you’re looking at. My system over the past two years has been something very similar to yours: PROJECTNAME_Type of edit (e.g., assembly, rough, teaser, full, etc.)_v#_MMDDYY and like others I might add a quick _descriptiveEnding of a major difference. Also, I often have export to export the same exact edit in different ways, so for that I’ll append whatever the difference is for the export itself, be it: _V1ONLY, _NO-MUSIC, _PR422, _RGB, or whatever.

I can also add that in the past year I’ve developed a habit of having a CURRENT CUT bin and then a bin just called CUT ARCHIVES. Makes all the difference.

The funny thing is, the habit becomes so ingrained that I find myself labeling a simple photo of a friend off my phone this way to post on facebook or a blog. “PARK-012812_JULIE_image7_CROPPED.jpg” … haha, okay, maybe not that extreme, but nonetheless I find myself naming everything with dates and descriptions.

Great article, Shane, as always. Dating names using the Japanese system (YYYY-MM-DD) is good practice, but sometimes I work in the opposite direction.

I also work in software development, where particular files need to keep the same name, regardless of the version. So I name the current FINAL FINAL FINAL version simply “cut”, and the other versions “cut_old”, “cut_older”, “cut_without_CC”, “cut_pleasenomorechanges”, etc. You get the idea.

I could not help but comment on this post. Hilarious! This made me laugh so hard. But it’s so true and after all…there really isn’t ever a thing called “final” since there’s always that one tweak you’d like to make (or is given to you) eventually you just have to….be “done”.

I’m not superstitious but naming anything “final” is the kiss of death!