How are you organizing with your footage?

[BasharOfTheAges]

I actually have the largest case I could find, 2 free drive bays (close to 8 if i grab solid state drives) but no SATA ports left on my editing system. All 6 on-board ones are filled up, and i'm stuck using a PATA ribbon cable on my DVD drive. I'd add a PCI SATA expansion card on if I could find some decent HUEG cables to route all the way from where that would need to mount to the new drive slots.

[LantisEscudo]

I edit on more than one machine, so externals are very helpful for carrying whole projects from machine to machine. With USB3, the speed hit isn't very bad, and the convenience outweighs the minor performance hit.

As to the original topic, I rip and make lossless files of whole episodes, and I have a text file of timecodes for scenes I may want to use. I bring the whole episode into my NLE and use the text file as a guide for where to find a particular scene I want at a given time.

[siny]

I throw all the episodes in Vegas, turn on the song that I'm editing to on repeat, and then get every possible clip that fits for my story. Then after that, I sift through everything again, looking for the ones that I really like out of the bunch. Then I just start editing. Sometimes if I have over an hour or two worth of clips, then I have to repeat step 3 and sift through them again.

I actually do something similar to this. Like paco I throw all the episodes in Vegas. Then I watch episode by episode and create subclips with the scenes that might fit my song/story/etc. It's a bit like rewatching an entire anime, but since I only work with animes I've seen, I usually know what I'm looking for so I don't even play the episodes, I just zoom in to look at the frames. Of course sometimes, when I have more time, I do end up rewatching some of my favorite episodes lol

I found this very helpful for future videos and MEP parts. If I want to use a particular scene again or that I didn't end up using on that old project. I just have to open it and "Oh there it is! Ok so episode 6 from season 1, got it!". With smaller animes with 13 episodes or something, I usually recycle that same project and just delete everything on my timeline and grab the new song. But my selection of scenes will take less time now that I have most of my favorite scenes picked.

If it's a bigger anime or if I'm doing a mix, I organize my scene selection into folders in Vegas. The easier example would be Watery Symphony of Kai where I have folders (or bins in Vegas) called "winter, spring, autumn, summer". Or for example when I'm working with Code Geass, I also name the folders like "1st season, 2nd season, young lulu, past cc" etc. It's very useful if I end up leaving that project on hold for a few days or weeks, since I have it all organized it will take less time (imo) to refocus on what I need to keep working on it.