Organizing your videos

- When you start working on serious video projects, you might be surprised by just how much data they involve. Even relatively simple projects can end up having a lot of individual media files inside the project. In this example project, I've imported a typical set of resources. I've got half a dozen video files, a selection of stock images and logos, and some audio files for sound effects, voiceover and music. This would be fairly typical for a short, two to three minute promotional video. So you can imagine how busy things can get if you're working on anything longer or more complex.

Thankfully, HitFilm's media panel has several features to make it easier to curate and organize your files. There are two different display modes. Preview mode includes thumbnail images of each item, so that you can identify it at a glance. This can be very useful if you have files straight off a camera, which don't have descriptive file names. You can also switch to list mode. This doesn't include thumbnails, but it has the benefit of taking up less space, so that you can fit more items onto the list. If your files are well-organized or have good descriptive names, then this is often a good mode to switch to.

At first though, I recommend sticking with preview mode, because it makes it easier to see what is what. You can also arrange your items by name or by type. Switching to by type will group file types together, all mp4 videos, all mov videos, all jpg images, all mp3 music, and so on, you get the idea. You can quickly the reverse the order of this list using the sorting button. The grouping menu offers two options, by media and by folder.

I'll switch to media to demonstrate that first. You can see that all the items in the list have now been automatically been organized into folders, according to their general type. On simple projects, this can be a super-fast and very effective way to get organized, without having to do any actual, manual work. Sometimes, however, you want to get your hands dirty and organize your files yourself, so that you know exactly where everything is. Switching back to the folder grouping allows you to create your own custom folders, into which you can put absolutely anything that you want.

Clicking the new folder button creates a brand new folder. You can then give it a new name. I'll go for interview clips for this one. And then you can drag any media items into the folder. This way, you can arrange your files according to the natural logic and flow of the project itself, which is much more powerful than simply relying on the type of media that those files happen to be. You can hold down the control key to select multiple items at the same time, or hold down the shift key to select an entire range.

This is a fast way to move lots of files into folders, rather than doing them one by one. Even more useful is a handy shortcut whereby you can drag files directly onto the new folder button. This will actually create a new folder and move all of those files into it automatically. It's a really great time saver. You can rename any item in the media list. Either choose rename from the items menu or press the corresponding keyboard shortcut. This only renames it inside HitFilm. Your source files are unaffected.

You can actually use renaming to note down particularly good clips or even bad clips, so that you can easily spot them at a glance, while browsing through your media panel. On really simple projects, you might not feel the need to organize your files. But even simple projects can actually balloon in complexity unexpectedly, so putting in time to organize your files can really save you time later on. Now that you know how to import and organize clips, it's time to do some real editing.