Emotion - It’s the driving force behind every video production professional’s work. What do we want the audience to feel? How do we want them to act based on those feelings? These are two essential questions to ask before starting any production. And what could be more emotional, more moving, more inspiring than working for a mission dedicated to finding cures for children battling catastrophic diseases?

One of the most important skills you can bring to post-production is organization. Knowing how to keep track of all your assets will only help make your workflow faster and more efficient. This is especially true if you work in a shared environment where there may be several different editors working on the same project at different times.

In this post I thought I would demonstrate how I arrange assets on my hard drive so that I know exactly where everything is at any given time. This is a method that I actually learned from my work at St. Jude and it has proven to be very helpful for our team. Since we sometimes re-visit projects months later to re-cut for a different need, having a nice, tidy file structure on our servers helps future editors to get up and running much faster.

Here's a look at how I divide up my assets on my hard drive, starting with the main project folder: