Names That Still Make Sense Three Years Later

A file name is a decision made once and paid for later. The test we use is a stranger reopening the project in three years, with nobody left to ask, and knowing which cut they are looking at.

Decide before the first import

The convention has to exist before the first clip lands. Frame.io's guidance is blunt: get the standard in place early, because renaming mid-edit is tedious and can break media links. It also says the convention should reach past camera originals to drives, project files, bins, sequences, exports and archival material.

That last part is what makes what we keep after delivery usable. A retention plan only helps if the thing you kept can be found.

Dates that sort, characters that travel

Write dates the ISO 8601 way, with a four-digit year and leading zeros. A string like 03122016 is March 12 or December 3, depending on who's reading. MASV uses that exact example. ISO order also sorts chronologically for free.

Keep the character set small. SMPTE's own document naming limits description fields to letters, digits and hyphens, with the version date as YYYY-MM-DD. For media, that's a sensible floor. No spaces, no colons, no slashes; an underscore or a dash does the job. Backups are a small case of the same idea: MASV suggests starting their names with zz so they sink to the bottom of a sorted list instead of crowding the live files. Length matters too. Some systems cap names at 255 characters, and a long one is unreadable in a narrow bin panel.

Final is a cut stage, not a version

MASV separates the two. Stringout, assembly, rough, fine, final and master are stages of the cut. The version is a counter that runs alongside, and it recommends three digits, v002 rather than v2, so numbers sort correctly and you never run out. Their template shows the idea: project, cut stage, destination, resolution, date, version.

Frame.io's cautionary example is the filename ending in "final_final". Once final is a version, the next round of notes has nowhere to go. It matters downstream as well. When every cut gets graded twice, the grade has to say which cut it belongs to, and it cannot if the name only says final.

Folders carry what names don't

Anything that is the same for a whole batch belongs in the folder, not in every file. Shoot date is the usual candidate. Moving it up a level keeps filenames short, and short names get read.

Some formats depend on a fixed folder layout, and renaming inside them can break imports. Leave them alone and put them under a parent folder that follows your own convention. Cameras also write generic names. On a job with several contributors, rename them to something meaningful at ingest, and keep a set of empty folder templates so every project starts with the same shape.

Write it down once

One page, in one place everyone can reach. MASV recommends keeping the convention logged centrally, and enforcing it at upload rather than cleaning up afterward. Frame.io's argument for it is practical: an assistant editor gets up and running quickly, and an editor reopening an archived project doesn't have to reverse engineer the workflow. It is the first thing we hand to someone learning to assist without a pipeline around them.

The working note

Pick a template. Put the date in ISO order, keep the version counter separate from the cut stage, and let folders carry the rest. Then keep it boring. Boring names survive a change of editor, drive or facility. The same habit serves the picture, the score and the mix, and the sound sessions are where we'd check it first.