Management of video files

<p>I am not a professional videographer, but I find that I am taking more and more video of family related events using a variety of devices (GoPro, Sony Nex5N and D800). Keeping the video clips organized continues to be difficult for me and I am wondering what best practices in this space might be.<br>

History: I manage over 500,000 (collected over the past 15 plus years) still pictures using Aperture (Mac) and I can backup and archive the picture without difficulty. I have now completed a project that removes everything from that collection except for family related still pictures and placed that on a drive for my wife to access on a regular basis.<br>

Storage of raw video content is spread out over iMovie, Aperture and Final Cut Pro X and I would like to consolidate all the video into one structure like I have done with our still pictures. iMovie and Final Cut Pro X are nice tools for editing, but they seem to like serious database functionality. Aperture has a great database structure but no editing capabilities. Worse, Aperture does strange things to AVCHD files (Sony) which I have not been able to fully work around.<br>

So I am wondering how other people have solved video clip archiving and viewing on the Mac (or what are best practice video management strategies).<br>

Thanks.</p>

<p>Hi Steve.<br>

Welcome to the world of video storage. There are numerous challenges in this area and most of the solutions are not cheap. The broadcasters have been wrestling with this one for years, but the crux of the matter is that editing packages are not content management systems. Therse are the things that need addressing.<br>

1. Video tends to come in different shapes and sizes and not always readable across different editing packages. Solution, convert to a "standard format" before archiving.<br>

2. Metadata is needed to enable effiicient searching. Unfortunately editing packages don't add metadata to the actual files they are using. You can log and mark up clips to your heart's content inside FCP but when the project is closed that metadata is lost. Partial Solution? Stick to one editing system and use it for searches etc. Another option is to use a batch utility to re-name clips on ingest so that these new names contain useful metadata (date, location etc) appended to their original clip name. If you are only archiving edited material this means naming the sequence before exporting to your chosen format.<br>

Having said all that my understanding is that FCPX is developing rapidly and it is quite possible that some of these points have been addressed. I suggest you have a dig around the FCPX forums.<br>

<a href="https://forums.creativecow.net/fcpxtechnique">https://forums.creativecow.net/fcpxtechnique</a></p>

<p>Best of luck!</p>