Keeping track of clips

Just started using Shotcut. Here’s my question: Each time I film a number of clips with my Camcorder and download them onto my hard drive then erase the card and begin filming again, the Camcorder will label the folders and clips the same as previously. My question is, how do you handle that? I’m already getting confused amongst the different folders and clips? Does that need to be handled in the camera itself or is there and easy way of ordering the clips?

This is common with camcorders and the common solution is to create a very short dummy file and rename it each time you format the card then copy the dummy file to it before putting it back into the camcorder.

Sorry Buddy, but I don’t quite follow you. Please be so kind as to explain it further. I’m real new to this all and 80 years old so I’m a little slow on the uptake these days. By creating a dummy file do you mean a video clip and if so where and how do I create it? Or can it just be a Word file you drag and drop onto the memory card while it’s still in the laptop?

when i find myself in a similar situation what i’ll do is rename the files that i uploaded to my hard drive…you can either right click the filename and select rename from the sub-menu and rename the file to your personal taste, taking care not to remove or edit the .(file extension)… and thereby rendering the file useless. you can also highlight the file and press the sub-menu key and press m and rename the file in that manner…i prefer the latter method as the .(file extension) is not selected and better attention can be taken to avoid renaming that portion of the filename…
when renaming the filenames in this manner…your camcorder can write new files to it’s drive, and on uploading new files to your hard drive you can be assured you won’t be overwriting any of your previously renamed files…you can then rename any newly added files from your camcorder as you did previously…wash, rinse, repeat…until you’ve filled the drive with as many clips as it will hold…
hope this helps…

As a secretary, what I would recommend is that you create a new file folder for each time that you empty your memory card on the computer. Something easy - like the date. You can have all of your folders in the same main folder, but it does make things a little easier to manage when you’re dealing with a lot of the same type of file.

Another tip, is that once you have everything in your new folder, you could select all of the files in question, and then rename them.

We take a lot of photos of our cats, so when I’m moving them from my smartphone to my computer, I put all of the pictures for one cat in their own file. To keep track of things, once I’ve added all of the photos for one cat, I’ll select all of the new photos and rename them with that cat’s name and the yy/mm that the pictures were taken in. The computer automatically numbers them 1 through x.

If you do this (or something along these lines) that should help you keep track of your video files. It only adds about 2 minutes (if that) to your time as you transfer your files from one place to another, but it makes things so much easier to keep track of. :slight_smile:

Hope this helps.

Johane

Thanks for the quick replies guys.