How to Organise a Video Edit Before You Make the First Cut

The worst edits I have worked on did not go wrong in the timeline. They went wrong in the first hour, when someone dragged four hundred clips into a project, named the sequence "final", and started cutting. Two weeks later nobody could find the second take of the interview, the music had gone offline, and the "final" sequence had six siblings with names like "final v3 REAL".

Organising footage is the least glamorous part of editing, and it decides how much of your attention is left for the actual story. Here is the routine I use on every project, from a two minute social clip to a feature documentary.

Start with a folder structure you never change

Before importing anything, create the same folder tree on disk for every project. Mine looks like this: 01_footage, 02_audio, 03_music, 04_graphics, 05_project, 06_exports. Inside footage, one folder per shoot day and per camera, named by date in the order year, month, day so they sort correctly.

The point is not that this particular tree is perfect. The point is that it is identical every time, so your hands know where things are without thinking. When a colleague opens your drive, they can find the B camera from day two in seconds. Projects that invent a new structure each time spend that time instead on searching.

Copy, verify, then back up

Never edit from camera cards, and never trust a plain drag and drop for important footage. Use an offload tool that verifies checksums, such as the copy function in DaVinci Resolve's Clone tool or a dedicated app like Hedge or ShotPut. They compare the copy with the original byte for byte and tell you if something failed.

Then make a second copy on a different drive before you format a single card. The common rule is three copies, on two kinds of media, with one stored somewhere else. On small jobs I settle for two drives and a cloud backup of the project file. On anything that cannot be reshot, I follow the full rule.

Bins that mirror the story, not the camera

Inside the editing software, organise by how you will look for things while cutting. The folder on disk follows the camera; the bins in the project follow the story. For an interview piece that might mean bins for each interviewee, a bin for b-roll grouped by location, a bin for archive material and a bin for music.

Spend twenty minutes adding basic metadata as you go: scene or location names, a star rating on usable takes, and a short note on anything special, like "best answer on budget question" or "drone shot, no audio". Most editing applications let you search and filter on these fields later. That twenty minutes saves hours in the third week, when the producer asks for "that shot of the harbour at sunset" and you remember it existed but not where.

Proxies before you need them

High-resolution footage from modern cameras can bring even fast computers to a crawl, especially long-GOP codecs like H.264 and H.265 that are hard to decode. Proxies are lightweight copies, usually in ProRes Proxy or DNxHR LB, that the software uses while you edit and swaps back to the originals when you export.

Generate them at the start, overnight if necessary, rather than after the timeline starts stuttering. Keep them in a clearly named folder inside the project directory so they travel with it. A smooth timeline is not a luxury. When playback stutters, editors stop watching shots through and start cutting on assumptions.

Sync and label sound early

If audio was recorded separately, sync it before cutting anything. Most editors can sync by waveform automatically, which works well when the camera recorded a scratch track. Check a few clips by eye anyway. A one-frame offset that nobody notices on day one becomes a lip-sync complaint on delivery day.

Label audio channels clearly too. "Channel 1: lav, channel 2: boom" written into the clip name or metadata prevents a lot of confused soloing later. Good audio habits matter even more for spoken content, which we cover in the cheapest upgrades that actually improve podcast audio.

Why "just start cutting" is overrated advice

There is a popular view, especially in online editing tutorials, that organisation is procrastination and you should dive straight into the timeline while the ideas are fresh. For a thirty second clip with ten shots, fair enough. For anything longer, I think it is bad advice.

The ideas you have in the first hour are shaped by whatever footage you happened to look at first. Spending that hour logging and rating the material means your first cut is built from the best moments, not the first ones you found. Editors who skip this often end up restructuring the whole piece later, which costs far more time than the logging would have taken.

Sequences, versions and naming

Name sequences with a project code, a short description and a version number, such as HRB_interview_cut_v04. Never overwrite a version that has been shared with anyone. Duplicate it, increment the number and keep going. When a client asks to go back to "the one from Tuesday", you will be glad you did.

Keep a single plain text file in the project folder listing what changed in each version. It takes thirty seconds per version and it answers questions that the timeline alone cannot.

A checklist before the first cut

• Folder structure created and footage offloaded with verification.
• Second copy made on a separate drive.
• Bins built around the story, with locations and people named.
• Usable takes rated and key moments noted.
• Proxies generated and linked.
• Audio synced, checked and labelled.
• First sequence named with a version number.

The same discipline applies to bigger productions, including game studios cutting trailers from thousands of hours of captured gameplay, as we describe in how online game trailers are edited to hook players fast. Organisation is not glamorous, but it is what lets you stay creative in week three. Read more in our Video Editing section.