As a micro-budget filmmaker, one of the ways in which to keep your career making films sustainable is by staying efficient all the way through to delivery. If your film is a micro-budget, it likely means that you are going to have to edit the film and the last thing that you want to have happen is delays. Delays are poison to the profitability of your film and inefficiencies are often time a direct cause of this.
I started out as an assistant editor for a number of TV shows on television networks such as TLV, Bravo, NatGeo, Food Network, Fox and more. These jobs had me manage hours upon hours of footage for each episode. From my experience working on all these shows, I have been able to streamline my post-production workflow and this starts with file management and organization. It has served me well as I moved to an editor role and on my own projects.
When it comes to micro-budget filmmaking, one of the first things I have seen that keeps people from making a second film is major delays in post-production. When it takes years to complete a film the motivation to do it again quickly dies. By organizing your post-workflow and planning for it before even shooting you can get ahead of the game and be ready to have a streamlined workflow that will help you to get your film cut and ready for distribution
In the video tutorial I shared above, I share with you how to properly set up your projects in Premiere Pro CC. From working on multiple TV Shows and for various ad agencies, my process has been able to evolve. You know something works when you return to a facility and find that a workflow you introduced has been implemented by that company as standard best practices.
This project structure is the best way I have found to easily find your footage as well as pass it on to another editor without them getting lost and spending hours attempting to interpret your project organization.