File naming convention
Also known as: naming scheme, file naming
A consistent pattern for naming footage so a card from last season can be found without opening anything, decided once and applied every time.
Updated
What it means
A naming convention is a decision about the future. Camera files arrive with names like GX010123, which identify nothing, and the only time anybody will rename them usefully is at the offload.
What a good pattern contains is short. A date, a location and a camera, in that order, which sorts chronologically on its own and answers the only questions anybody asks of an archive.
It is the half of organisation that takes no maintenance at all. A Media library with tags is more powerful and takes maintenance, where a naming pattern works even when every application has been uninstalled.
How it works in practice
The date goes first and in reverse order. A year, then a month, then a day, which is the only arrangement that sorts correctly in every file browser without any help from it.
Keeping the camera original number is worth doing. Appending rather than replacing means a clip can still be matched back to the card it came from, which matters when two cameras recorded the same run.
Applying it during the Card offload is the only moment it happens. Renaming later never gets done, and renaming after an edit breaks every link a project file holds.
What to watch out for
Renaming after import breaks relinking. An application matches files by name, so a tidy-up halfway through a project turns every clip into Offline media with nothing obvious to point at.
Spaces and punctuation cause avoidable trouble. Underscores and hyphens travel between operating systems and a Cloud backup service, where spaces, slashes and accents produce errors somebody has to debug.
A pattern nobody can remember is not a pattern. Six fields and a project code gets abandoned by the third session, where three fields survive a season without needing any discipline at all.
How RawClip handles it
Uploaded files keep whatever names they arrived with, and the analysis reads the footage rather than the names. A sensible pattern still matters afterwards, since matching a delivered result back to the original session is done by name more often than by anything else.