How to 1: Naming Sound Files for Export
Intro: W and I have been working together across the country on our most complicated editing project ever. To keep our work consistent and legible over the months and to save ourselves from spending time repeating discoveries, thought-processes and mistakes, we’ve been writing ourselves instructions and standards. We thought we might as well post them on the internet. If they’re useful, great. Or if you have suggestions, we’d really appreciate that too.
We’re making a film - all our audio and video come in separately. Keeping good logs of the sound in FCP is crucial. But it’s not much use when you’ve exported the file to a sound editor like Pro Tools. So we’ve developed this naming convention for exporting our sound from FCP.
NAMING CONVENTIONS
Types of Sound: Y, S, T, W, F, M
Y = Sync dialogue recorded on location.
S = Dialogue recorded on location, but not on camera.
T = “Room Tone” for dialogue, recorded on location.
A = ADR, or looped, dialogue, recorded in studio.
W = Wild background sound, or off-screen dialogue, recorded on location.
F = Foley: sound effects either recorded on location, in studio, or downloaded/bought.
M = Music
Naming a file: Sc{scene#}_{description}_{type}{type#}_v{version#}
So, for example, the sync dialogue from Scene 02, a close up of Jerome, would be: Sc02_CU-J_Y01.
If we had another take it would be: Sc02_CU-J_Y02. Tone from that scene would be Sc02_CU-J-T01.
Let’s say we recorded some music called “Blondes Ska” (not for a particular scene). It’d be blondesska_M01. And if we made a new version of that song, it’d be blondeska_M01_v02.
Naming a cut file: {originalname}_{in-time}_{description}
So if we had a long take of ambience from Scene 3, and we found some good birds sound effects in there at 01:02:04:02, we’d cut that out and name the new file: Sc03_ambience_W01_01020402_birds.
OK.
L
Outro: Sorry to the vast majority of people for whom this is useless/boring. Better blog posts to come.