Organising footage in the Video by Zaweba media bin

Every file you bring into a project lands in the media bin, and how you keep that bin decides how quickly you can work later. In Video by Zaweba the bin is more than a pile of thumbnails. It has folders, three ways of looking at your files, a search that understands kinds of media, and a way of seeing what is inside a clip without opening it.

A small project with a dozen clips needs very little care. A documentary with three days of interviews, cutaways, music and graphics needs a system, and the bin gives you the parts to build one.

Bins inside bins

A bin is simply a folder inside the project. Make one, move files into it, and rename or delete it as the project changes shape. You can nest bins by typing a path: a bin named "Interviews/Day 1" makes a Day 1 bin inside an Interviews bin in one go. That saves a lot of clicking when you set up a structure at the start of a job.

A layout that works for most edits is one bin per kind of material (interviews, cutaways, music, graphics) with dated or numbered bins inside the busy ones. Keep the names short. You will be reading them in narrow panels all day, and "Day 1" scans faster than "Footage from the first day of shooting".

Moving files between bins never touches the files on your disk. Video by Zaweba only ever reads your originals, so the bins are a way of organising the project, not your folders.

Three views, one button

The bin cycles through three views with a single button. Icons give you a picture of each file, which is the quickest way to spot a shot by eye. The list view trades pictures for detail: a small picture, the name, the kind, the pixel size, the bin it sits in, the length and the file size. That is the view to use when you are checking that every camera recorded at the same size, or hunting for the one huge file that is slowing your drive.

The freeform view lets you drag files anywhere in the panel. It suits the early stage of an edit, when you are grouping shots by feel rather than by name, laying out a rough storyboard of the order you have in mind, or keeping the best takes in one corner.

To pick several files at once, drag a rectangle round them in any view. From there you can move them to a bin together or drag them onto the timeline.

Finding a file again

Find filters the bin as you type. It matches names, and you can narrow it to a kind of file: video, sound, picture or graphic. It also searches logged metadata, so whatever you have noted against your clips becomes something you can search on later. On a long project that is the difference between scrolling for a minute and finding the shot at once.

A good habit is to type a few letters, glance at the result and clear the search straight after, so you are never confused by a bin that looks half empty because a filter is still on.

Hover scrub and poster frames

Hover scrub shows a video's frames as you move the mouse across its tile. Slide from left to right and you see the clip play through under the pointer, which tells you far more than a single still. It is the fastest way to check which of six similar takes has the moment you want.

Each tile shows a poster frame, and you can choose which frame that is. The first frame of a clip is often a slate, a blurred pan or a black screen, so picking a frame that shows the actual content makes the icon view much more useful.

Mistakes worth avoiding

The most common one is leaving everything in the top level of the bin until the project is large, then trying to sort it. Make the bins on day one, even if some stay empty for a while.

Another is renaming bins halfway through an edit to something clever. Plain names you will recognise next month are better. And if the bin is filling with files you tried and abandoned, the tidy tools covered in a separate guide can clear out unused files and merge duplicates, rather than you deleting things by hand and guessing which ones the timeline still needs.

Treat the bin as the project's filing cabinet and the timeline as the desk. Keep the cabinet in order and the desk stays clear.