Creating a Reel

Organizing Hard Drives

As you scale up in the amount of footage you have, it's a good idea to keep your selects to one drive along with your project file. This way you can quickly plug in that single drive, drop in your new footage that you'd like to cut in, then add it to your reel.

After each job is delivered, get the full resolution export of the final deliverable. If there is nothing of worth for your reel or not something you are proud of, don't bother keeping it. As your final projects grow to be something more than you can fit on one drive, start to sort them on a hard drive by year and then by category (narrative, music video, commercial).

Give everything on the drive a colored label.

• Green - Things that are actually included in the reel are green
• Orange - Things to include on the next edit are orange
• No label - projects that aren’t included

This way if the drive fills up the ones without a label can easily be discarded or pushed to another drive.

Have your drives be Mirrored RAIDS. Simplest way to keep a back up that is accurate and up to date.

Always keep your hard drives in two separate places. If you keep one in your house, keep the other in the garage. Don't walk around or drive around with both hard drives if you can avoid it because it only takes on slip to destroy both hard drives.