Organizing a Personal Hard Drive

We recommend all COM majors have at least 1 TB of external storage during your tenure at BU. Those with particularly heavy production work loads or intense involvement in BUTV may want more storage or even a separate external drive for extracurriculars to keep your computer free of clutter.

The first step with new hard drives is to format it according to the devices you use and your needs. (Instructions for this action will vary according to specific hard drive brand and computer type.)

Once that is done, you can make your first folder. This folder will hold everything you produce during your time at BU. You can name it BU, BostonU, or Undergrad ( the specific name isn’t important as long as it is clear what content it holds.

The flow chart below is a recommend way to set up your storage device. Each folder gets broken down into smaller and smaller sections to make it easy to find specific projects.

The “video” folder should be broken down into more subsections according to the type of project. The clips can be organized based on which camera they were filmed on (if there was a multi-cam set up) or by date if it’s a longer term project. In the case of scripted content, something like: 3_1_A1 can signify the scene, take number, and camera respectively.
Every type of media you need for your project should have its own folder i.e. graphics (gfx), ADR, music, sound effects (SFX). (Some of these folders can even slot into a more generic “audio” folder for more organization.

Important Note: the “Adobe” folder listed in flowchart above denotes where Adobe’s autosaves, file data etc. should live for each project. By default, Adobe saves these files to the “documents” folder whenever a new project is created. To change the default location, upon opening Premiere, Audition or any editing program, change the project location from documents to the project-specific Adobe folder (see image below). That way it is easy to find autosaves and previous versions of a project if the software crashes or you are editing across multiple devices.