How to organise a video archive

Start with active projects and keep originals separate from exports.

Video is a filing problem before it is a storage problem

A folder of camera originals becomes unusable for a simple reason: the filenames are numbers, and the numbers mean nothing a month later. The archive does not need a new player. It needs a way to keep the originals, a smaller preview, and a name a person would actually search for, without making three copies by hand.

Start with the shoot, not with the codec. One folder per day or per job, named the way the job is already called in your calendar. Inside it, leave the camera filenames alone. Add a short text note at the top of the folder with the place, the client, and who was holding the camera. Search will find that note. It will not invent a title from a clip.

Previews, not second masters

A preview exists so you can recognise a shot without downloading the original. It is not a graded master and it is not a file you hand to a client as the finished piece. Datatransfer keeps the preview beside the original and does not bill it as a second copy of the archive. Deleting the preview does not delete the camera file.

For interviews and long recordings, the useful mark is a time, not a thumbnail. Write the minute where the answer starts into the note. A folder of twenty interviews is then searchable by the question, and the original is still the file the editor opens.

What not to reorganise

Do not rename the originals to match a scheme you invented on a Friday. Editors and the camera itself will keep producing the old numbers, and you will have two naming systems by Monday. Do not split one shoot across personal drives so that only the highlights are in the archive. The highlights are easy to keep. The unused takes are the ones a client asks for in six months.

Shared folders follow the same rule as any other folder here. A person who cannot see the shoot cannot see its previews either. A person who can see the shoot sees the note and the preview, and downloads the original only when they mean to.

Nothing in this changes the plans or the price. If a particular camera produces files that never get a preview, tell the help centre which model it is.