Preventing Project Heartbreak

[Brumble Buffin]

A friend of mine, using a competitor's product, got 4 hours into his project and somehow, by ignorance and/or carelessness, lost it all and had to start over again. Not good!
So my question is about project management.

When starting a new project, what is the first thing you do? Should you collect your assets in a dedicated folder and, as the project develops, use Save As to store the project there?
What is a pack folder? How would you set the Import and Export choices in Preferences?

Any good ideas on getting a project started on the right foot?
Thanks very much!

[BrianCee]

You will probably find that each and everyone of us has a different procedure and it is what works for you that is important in having a workflow that you are comfortable with and are therefore unlikely to make a mistake

My procedure

first create a new folder on my hard drive (usually under "Videos") giving it the name I am going to use for the project. then COPY into it all the base videos I expect to use

Create a new library pane inside Videostudio and import those videos into it - now remember in Videostudio the images in the library are NOT your video files - they are just links to the files - so even if Videostudio crashes and destroys the library you videos will not be touched

Then I start editing sending any thing I create to the folder on the hard drive - whenever I want to stop for a while I do a file >> save as and give the project file the project name followed by the time of the point in the timeline I stopped - now when you next start you know where to carry on from

and basically just keep doing that sending every thing to the project folder.

[Ken Berry]

Brian's practice of creating several project names (the original project name followed by different times when he stopped for a while) is particularly useful if something later goes wrong in the latest named project. You then don't lose the whole thing, but can simply open the immediately previous project and proceed from there again.

And no need to worry about this taking up a lot of space. Video Studio Project (VSP) files are not large as they don't contain any video. They are merely small text files telling VS what clips are in the project, where they are stored, and what editing has been done to them.

[asik1]

Hi Buffin, your first step will be to set your "automatic save intervals" to 2 minutes.
Do periodically "save as" ...ver01,....02,....03
After crash event immediately save the recovered project as a new version

[Brumble Buffin]

Thank you Brian, Ken and asik! Very helpful.