Best Practices

1. SAVE EARLY AND OFTEN: Technical issues can and do occur, and while auto-saves are a nice safety net, they're no replacement for frequently clicking save.
2. USE CLEAR NAMING: Concise and descriptive names for your files and folders help you stay organized and make it easier for others who may need to interact with them.  Avoid ambiguous or repetitive names like "New Project Final Cut Re-edit REALLY FINAL 2.prproj".
3. USE DATES: Incorporating dates within your file names (e.g. "MoveMeProject_2025-03-07.prproj") can help with versioning as well as organization.  It also makes them easy to sort by filename.
4. AVOID SPECIAL CHARACTERS: Spaces ( ), underscores (_), dashes (-), periods (.) and standard alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) are all safe to use in your file naming in most cases.  Avoid punctuation like slashes (/ or \), quotes (' or ") or other special characters unless you're certain they won't create issues.  While it's rare this will cause issues, you can avoid issues entirely by keeping file names simple.
5. ORGANIZE FILES AND FOLDERS: Consider creating subfolders for the various files and other elements used in your project.  Additionally, you can number them to indicate their order or importance in your workflow.  For a video project, this might be source video and audio assets, the actual Premiere project files, and any exports.  For websites, this might be images, CSS files, scripts, or other elements that you need to link in HTML.  Make sure you organize the physical files in your project folder before importing them to your project.  Here's an example from CA659 - Advanced Motion Picture Production Workshop:
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6. MATCH STRUCTURE: The organization of assets within your project (e.g. bins and clips in Premiere) does NOT directly reflect the location of those files locally, on the network, or in the cloud.  It's good practice to loosely mirror the organization of assets within the project with the physical files and folders saved on your drive or the network.  Additionally, a good file organization scheme will make it easier to move or copy parts of your project or all of it later (e.g. sharing reference edits with an audio mixer).
7. KEEP A BACKUP: When possible, it's good to follow the 3-2-1 rule for file backups--keep 3x copies of your data on at least 2x different types of storage, with at least 1x offsite.  For media projects, this can be costly, but here are some tips:
   • Any data stored on the CommArts' Qdrive is backed up nightly in three places.  For CommArts coursework, it's recommended to store files on the Qdrive.
   • Cloud storage like Google Drive or Box can sometimes be an effective backup for smaller files (images, project files, audio).  Note that file size limits and storage quotas can make this difficult for large projects.
   • Copying your media files to an external drive, your personal computer, or even your own SD card can be a very effect backup option.
   • Your project file is generally small and easy to copy or even emailed to yourself.  Assuming you already have backup copies of your source materials (video, audio, images, etc.), the project file is easy to copy and move back and forth.  You'll spend most of your post-production time working with the project file, so it's important to keep a consistent backup of it.
   • Premiere and some other Adobe applications create periodic auto-saves of your project files, usually in the same folder as the project file.  Having an understanding of where these files live is helpful if you ever need to revert to a previous version of your project.
8. UNDERSTAND RELINKING: If you're moving between multiple workstations or collaborating with others, you'll likely encounter a situation where you need to relink assets in your project.  Each application may have a different method for doing this, so it's important to understand how it works and when to use it.
   
   • Relinking Offline Media in Adobe Premiere

Local, Network, Cloud

Saving Project Files

When starting a new project or saving an existing project, it's important that you make sure you're saving it to the right location.  For Macs in the CommArts IMC, make sure to follow these steps:

1. In Adobe Premiere, you'll see the default location that the file will be saved to.  To change this, click the Location dropdown > Choose location...
   
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2. If presented with a condensed file browser window, click the little arrow on the right to expand the window.
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3. Make sure to save your files onto the Qdrive, either in your Students folder (for personal projects) or in your Courses folder (for group work or if designated by your instructor).  DO NOT save files to the Desktop, Documents, or Downloads folder on the computer.
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