Managing a large DVD project - may be useful to others?
 

Hi all,

After working on a few complex projects we're engaged in one now which will lead to a DVD with 30+ subtitled items recorded in many different locations over a few months.

I'm using premiere pro (NLE) and encore (DVD authoring) and I was starting to worry that I'd lose track of all the project files / final renders etc etc and have that horrible experience of suddenly not finding something I know is vital and that I had on disk when I last looked.

After a lot of head-scratching I came up with a really simple idea to keep track of all this stuff:

1) I created a folder called "projects", containing subfolders for each shooting location and date (there are 22 of these already!). Each has one Premiere Pro project in it, plus associated footage and temporary render files.

2) At the same (top) level as the projects folder, I created another folder called "DVD". This has two Encore DVD projects in it: "work-in-progress" and "Scratch". I use the work-in-progress to build up a dvd full of assets which are already transcoded - I just open the program to add each new piece of video and then it just has to render the new ones. The "scratch" project is for testing out individual bits of files.

3) Finally, at the same (top) level as the "projects" and "DVD" folder, I created an Excel spreadsheet.

This has columns for "location", "project", status (ie done or not), "final file", "notes" etc - whatever's useful.

In the "Project" column I created a hyperlink to each Premiere Pro project and created a friendly text label to identify it.

In "final file" column, I created a link to the final file, again with a friendly label.

Using the other columns I can make notes about each project and the spreadsheet becomes a way of opening each project quickly without delving into files (apart from initially, to set up the hyperlinks). It's been a major time-saver as there are two of us working on this together.

Finally (not shown in the attachment) I have a link to the "work-in-progress" and "scratch" DVD projects - so I can fire those up whenever I need to add new content.

The best thing of all about working like this is that I can do a safety copy of all the material - including the Excel spreadsheet - onto another drive and it will maintain the link paths - or, in our case, we can unplug the drive and use a different computer to do more editing.

I hope this helps anyone in a similar situation, and of course apologies if this is teaching anyone to suck eggs. See attached for a screen-shot of part of the spreadsheet. Not pretty but it should illustrate what I'm getting at.

Mark