Principles of Naming Conventions for Post Production Workflows - Part 4

Example 1 - Archival Sports Documentary

Let’s begin these examples with a short and sweet naming convention.

These naming guidelines were developed for a historical sports documentary project that used archival clips, interviews, and dramatized vignettes. While the interview and vignette files kept their original names, the archival footage needed a convention that solved a few challenges.

For one, the film was edited on Avid MC by a team of archivists and editors across two countries with opposing time zones, so communication between the teams was scarcely real time.

The archival footage mainly featured historic matches of an international sport, with each region or country having its own copyright agency (and therefore its own licensing process). The footage was initially collected from broadcast tapes or YouTube links and later replaced with media acquired from the copyright holders after a licensing agreement was negotiated and signed.

A process was created for the edit team to parse sequence EDLs and ALEs into a spreadsheet that reflected where archival was used, and calculated the usage cost of each piece based on active negotiations with regional licensing agencies.

The solution was a straightforward indexed naming convention that facilitated the gathering, tracking, and pricing of archival footage and its copyrights using that spreadsheet.

Here are the basic guidelines of this naming convention, and a sample set of filenames derived from this naming convention:



Archival Naming Convention

-All archival footage filenames must begin with a 4 digit number, in order of its ingest. To find the latest number in order, please refer to the Archival Usage spreadsheet.

-Those 4 digits are followed by the type letter: a V (for archival video); a P (for archival images/pictures); or an S (for archival audio/sound).

-The type letter is followed by a dash and the copyright holder agency/country three-letter code. Please refer to the Archival Usage spreadsheet’s Holders tab for the corresponding copyright holder code.

-The type letter is followed by a dash, then the original filename/title of the archival footage, with all special characters removed, and spaces replaced with underscores ( _ ).

-For footage gathered from YouTube, please append the link ID to the end of the filename.



Sample filenames

0015V-BFC-World_Tournament_Victory_Celebration1_2018-QGRtf0ZCg9.mp4
0016V-BFC-World_Tournament_Victory_Celebration2_2018-IAoird988rq.mp4
0040S-ATC-EU_May_Match_2015_ATC_Radio_Broadcast.wav
0041S-RFF-EU_May_Match_2015_RFF_Announcements_Broadcast.wav
0054V-AUT-AUvEN_Game_Highlights_2016.mxf
0055V-AUT-AUvSA_Game_Highlights_2016.mxf
0058V-ICD-INvSL_WorldCup1995_204_252436_38.mov
0059V-ICD-INvSL_WorldCup1995_204_252436_39.mov
0065V-ICD-INvSL_WorldCup2010_304_252537_31.mov
0066V-ICD-INvSL_WorldCup2010_304_252537_32.mov
0073V-ICD-PKvIN_2005WorldChamp_252438_98803.mov
0074V-ICD-SAvIN_KnockOut2017_252438_98804.mov
0075V-GBO-APassageTo84.avi
0076V-RFF-GGD1948.mp4
0087V-ABD-46419_SecondTask.mp4
0088V-ABD-46421_GameLate.mp4