Keeping Track of Footage

Aaargh I have way too much footage to sort through, and still I know stuff is missing.

I’m losing track of all this stuff!
I haven’t even started sampling yet… I know that once I get stuff into the computer, it will be a lot easier for me to edit, since that is just the way my brain works (and sort of the reason I am so into film). However sampling every bit of footage into the machine is totally out of the question! I have to whittle it down a bit first!

  • OPTION ONE: Notebook keeping a physical set of notes is what I started doing.
    It’s good to have an actual phyiscal page associated with a given tape. However now that I have a bunch of tapes annotated, and not all are in order, it is getting a little confusing. Also, there is no fast way to shuffle the entries or sort them by topic.
  • OPTION TWO: Excel I absolutely need to sort by topic. How about in Excel? The rows heights are a little distracting- I”m going to have to resize each one to display the notes I write! Also I’ll have to turn on text wrapping for the descriptions, because otherwise the notes will flow into the next cell. It’s very tempting to write a “quick” PHP server application for this, backed by MySQL, but we have to stay focussed here…
  • OPTION THREE: Plain text (TextEdit) this eliminates some of the insanity of using Excel. However my sorting problems aren’t much better than the plain notebook. Although I would be able to search the documents…
  • OPTION FOUR: HTML text would let me link all the documents together. Hmmm. But then I have to write HTML pages for every entry! More infrastructure. And we get the server problem again.

Okay, I think I have a process going now. It’s sort of a little of everything.

First I watch the tapes and take notes in the notebook and/or the laptop. The notebook is capable of greater detail, and is physical- if the notes are only on the laptop, I print them out.

I summarize the shots I think are important in Excel, using some keywords so I can easily search for shots.

When these entries are converted to Excel, I copy the rows for a given tape into its own file, for later reference., and so I can easily double click on a file and see what was in the tape.

One thought on “Keeping Track of Footage

  1. hey brian,
    how about trying to do this using tables in word? the tables aspect is much easier to work with than in excel, you can do keyword searches, and you can have word convert the files into html to link. ah, but any way you look at it, you still have a ton of work. good luck!

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