Organize Your Photo and Video Files to Save Hours in Digital Storytelling

Last week we looked at saving your photo and video files to a hard drive for easy editing. Now that you have them on a hard drive, how do you organize them to match your storyboard? As you can see above, what you don’t want to do is look at nonsensical numbered files one by one. You need a simple system to enable you to tell your story with your photos and video. Today we’ll look at some simple tips to organize, view, and storyboard those files.

Organizing your video files

Once you have the footage on a hard drive, each tape will mostly be in its own huge file. The best way to organize these is to archive them using whatever movie editing software is easiest for you. Both Microsoft Media Player and Apple iMovie have archive features, so that you can keep track of all your movie files.

If you have a hard drive, flash (Flip, Zi8, etc.) or HDV camcorder, you will especially want to use some sort of archive system for your files. Those cameras create unique files each time you press record. You can wind up with dozens of files per event.

Personally, I created a project file of all my home movie tapes in Final Cut Pro. I logged each tape with detailed scene notes, including the cast of characters in each scene. This way, if I’d like to create a montage of one of my children through the years, I can easily pick out which scenes (and tapes) they are in.

Organizing your photo files

For photo organization, your best bet is to immediately import all the photos into your photo software (Adobe Bridge, iPhoto, Kodak Easyshare, etc.) Whatever you use for your digital photos, use for scanned photo files as well. And do it right after you scan them; before you lose excitement in your project.

Using your photo organization software prevents you from winding up with a Finder window (sorry, I’m a Mac kind of gal) full of anonymous numbered files. Any organizing software will allow you to create folders of your .jpg files. iPhoto allows you to use face recognition to easily organize the photos. This works to a point. If all your kids have big blue eyes and cute button noses, it tends to get confused.

The point is to organize your photo and video into a system which works for you. The goal is to be able to easily locate photos or video files containing specific people or scenes within 15 minutes. Any longer than that and you’ll give up on your project before it even begins.

Storyboarding your files

In order to use those photo and video files in your story, you’ll want to be able to move them around into different folders. Most photo software will allow you to create smart folders defined by whichever parameters or tags you set. Alternatively you can manually create folders. Make certain to sort those photos manually within the folder. It doesn’t do much good when trying to tell a story, if your software program automatically orders them by date or filename.

I like to intersperse my photos with the video, so I tend to create basic folders of the video files (in the video editing software) in the order I’d like them to appear. I then go back to my photo organizing software and create folders of photos to go between certain video clips.

From there, it’s pretty straightforward to export the folders of photos (renamed in the manual order you set). Here’s a sample file structure I wound up with, after exporting from iPhoto:As you can see, I organized my story by seasons. Within the seasons, I organized by various events for which I also had video clips. Other years, I have organized by sporting events, funny out-takes from each family member; you are only limited by your own creativity.

You can then import that folder into your video editing software and drop it right in between the video clips. Add some transitions and titles (we’ll cover that in another post) and your movie is pretty well complete.

The alternative is to painstakingly trim each video clip, add transitions one by one, then import the photos one by one and try to fit them in somewhere. You might find that you wind up with the same scene represented in both photos and video and it just doesn’t work. It’s really hard to keep track of your story when you write it piece by piece. It’s also hard to control the overall length of your movie when your edit it together that way.

I’ve been there. My first year-in-review movie took over 100 hours to put together. By the fourth one, I was down to about six hours. Organizing your photos and videos before trying to edit them will save hours; making it more likely for you to complete your movie.