Hi Rob Mack ,

I am talking about scripted fully planned shots.

I am trying to keep the shots organised throught the production fase.

For example.

Scene 20 plane crash scene.
Suppose originally this scene was made out of of 4 shots

20. 1 Ext overview airport.

20. 2 Ext Sky showing a plane coming towards the camera.

20. 3 Ext airport landing ground

20. 4 Ext Plane crashing on the ground.

I would ofcourse call them 20.1, 20.2, 20.3, 20.4

Naming hundreds of shots would be crazy!!

So I shoot the shots according these numbers and then import them to Vegas, After effects etc.

But during preview there are big chances that some changes may come to the sequence.

There may come a insert shot, for example between 20.1 and 20.2.

Say a crowd of people looking towards the sky.

To avoid changing the shot numbers before and after I would call that shot '20.1B' .

Because I have these shots with their original numbers sitting in many softwares each doing a layer or fx colour correction etc.

So getting them mixed up would be a big problem.

Thats the reason I ad a B, C behind them.

I was wondering how most editors coped with this problem.

VMP

It's something you'll have to work out to suit yourself, but there's definitely such a thing as having a system that's just too rigid.

I've put together naming systems for 20,000 page websites, and we also do lots of logging for product shoots as well as documentaries. I've not touched the documentary logging but that's generally done after the fact.

While naming hundreds of shots would be "crazy", I think you'd be driven mad as a hatter if you had to sort them out simply by number later on. I for one would never be able to remember what was in shot 20.1 if it didn't also have some descriptive text to it.

It's totally fine to abbreviate Scene 20, Shot 1, Take 10 as 20.1.10 but you really will need to include some descriptive text to describe the shot. Not doing so because it's "too much work" will bite you later.

The main problem with numbering is that it tricks you into thinking that this is THE order of the shots. Once you start editing you find you want to mix things up, add B-roll, do FX. So maybe you need names like "Scene 20, sky".

Think of the numbering system as a way to match shots to script. If you are looking at Scene 20, shot 1,2,3 of the script then the numbering system will help you to find the relevant clips. This sort of numbering should have been done when you broke down the script into a shot list or storyboard during preproduction.

I usually see people use a,b,c to indicate a variation on a shot or scene. So if you shot an alternate of a shot you might label it 20.1a for Scene 20, shot 1a(pple).

All bets are off in a doc. You don't usually know exactly how the scenes and shots will go together so it's more productive to do the naming in post. If you have a good PA with free time, you could have him/her keep a journal. I've never seen a doc that had such a PA before, though.

Rob