Label everything so you can find it again
Okay. You've got your box sorted, and you've backed everything up onto two separate places, and I'm not letting either of those go until I know you actually did them. Good.
Now we're going to do the part everyone wants to skip, which is naming things.
I know. It sounds like the boring cousin of actual editing. You want to open the software and start cutting clips together and making something. I get it. But here's the thing — if you skip this step, you will end up with a folder that has "clip1," "clip2," "IMG_4482," and "video_final_FINAL_2" sitting next to each other, and six months from now when you want to make a second video for your sister, you won't remember which file is your grandpa's 90th birthday and which one is a blurry ten seconds of the dog.
I've seen this folder. I've made this folder. Nobody's folder starts out organized.
Why this actually matters
A file name is the only thing standing between you and opening forty clips one at a time to figure out what's in them. That's it. That's the whole case for doing this.
And it's not just about you finding things today. It's about whoever inherits this project after you. Your kid, your sister, whoever ends up with the external hard drive someday. A tape that says "Grandma's camcorder, unlabeled" is exactly the situation my mom was in with my grandmother's shoe box. Nothing written on the back of a single photo. We had to guess who half these people were, and some of them we never figured out.
How to actually do it
Here's the system I use. It's not fancy, and you don't need special software for any of it.
Step one: rename the raw files first, before you import anything into an editor. Use this pattern: date (or approximate date), who's in it, where it's from. Something like:
1998_approx_Grandpa-brown-chair_homemovie.mp4
2003_ChristmasEve_kitchen_photos.jpg
If you don't know the exact date, write "approx" and your best guess. Don't leave it blank. A guess you can correct later is more useful than nothing.
Step two: make one folder per project, not one folder for everything. I keep a folder called "Grandpa video" and everything related to that project lives inside it — the raw clips, the photos, the audio, my notes. Nothing else goes in there. When the project's done, that folder is the whole record of it.
Step three: keep a plain text note or a notebook page listing what's in each file. This doesn't need to be elaborate. One line per clip. "Clip 3 — Grandpa telling the fishing story, sound cuts out at 1:40, use anyway." That kind of thing. I use an actual paper journal for this because I already use it for other stuff, and I like that I can find it without opening my laptop. That's just a preference of mine — a notes app works exactly as well.
A quick honest story about why this matters more than you'd think
When I finished the video for Michael's grandpa, Michael was actually away — he does a rotation for work and he was in North Dakota that week. I finished the edit late one night, sat at my kitchen table around 11pm, and watched the whole thing by myself. Cried through most of it, if I'm honest.
Afterward I texted him. Two lines. Short, because it was late and I didn't want to write an essay at midnight. He called me back from his hotel room within about five minutes.
Here's the part that matters for this lesson: I could send that text with confidence because I knew exactly which file was the finished version, exactly where it lived, and exactly what was in it. I wasn't digging through a folder of thirty options trying to remember which one was the real cut. The labeling had already been done, so the moment that mattered didn't get slowed down by me hunting for a file.
That's the whole point of this step. It's not glamorous. It just means that when something matters, you're not fumbling.
A caution while you're at it
While you're going through old tapes or files to rename them, don't delete anything yet, even the stuff that looks like a duplicate or a mistake. You might rename a file wrong, or realize later that "blurry ten seconds of the dog" is actually the only footage you have of a dog that's been gone twelve years. Renaming is not the same step as deleting. Keep those separate in your head.
Before next time
Go through your project folder and rename every raw file using the date-who-where pattern, even if the date is a guess. Bring your renamed folder next time — we'll start looking at what's actually in your footage.