Documentary Editing

2Organizing Your Footage

Before any editing can take place, two things must occur. First, the media files (footage, archival stills, music tracks, etc.) must be organized on the hard drive(s). Second, the files must be brought into a non-linear editing (NLE) platform such as Adobe Premiere Pro or Avid Media Composer and organized further. Although these are tedious processes, their successful completion is crucial to a successful edit because this is where the organizational backbone of the entire project is built. Doing this right is our first way of containing the chaos.

Organizing the Files on the Hard Drive

There is no single, universally ...