finder shortcuts/help me manage a lot of files in finder

[slug420]

so I am beginning some video editing and am struggling with how to use finder to efficiently manage all of my video clips.

I am importing clips with imovie and then dragging them onto the desktop. So now I have 30 files (from one of about 10 tapes) and I want to change the names on all of them to like ABC-Tape1.dv ABC-Tape2.dv etc etc, and set the comments on each one to reflect what the event is that the clip is of. I dont know that I need each comment to be unique...I might be able to work with "tape 1 of the wedding" or something for all 30 clips but even that seems to be involving a lot of really tedious clicking and typing.

I would also like to - though this is probably pushing it - have some quick way to get at all of this text so I can index all my files in an excel file or something. Is there an ls flag to show the file's comments? That would allow me to do an ls -comments when im all done with this work and highlight the text and paste it into excel...

I have always been a windows user...trying to give osx its fair shake...Help me use OSX's advancedness and finder's awesomeness to do all this quicker and more easily than I could have in windows.

thanks!

 

[killmoms]

Wait a sec, the whole point of iMovie '08 is that it maintains a library of your video clips. Why not just use that?

 

[slug420]

Wait a sec, the whole point of iMovie '08 is that it maintains a library of your video clips. Why not just use that?

I think I might use FCP for making my movies....and I know this is not the mac mentality but I dont trust these iapps to manage all my files for me. I dont know if it slows the app down at all but it has to be cumbersome to work in imovie with 300 clips as opposed to pulling in a clip as you decide to use it.

 

[richard.mac]

im not a FCP pro user but i think professionals that use FCP just store there projects in the Finder on the main disk or on an external drive and use another internal drive or an external drive (or RAM if youve got enough) as a scratch disk.

then you can add just add spotlight comments (as you suggested), colour labels, organise them in different folders etc so you can find your projects more quickly and intuitively. Leopard if you have it has these nice preset smart folders for movies and recent files in the Finder sidebar which you could find a use for. you can also make these in Tiger to by saving searches.

i feel the same way. i dont like keeping my movie projects in iMovie or my movies in iTunes. i just keep my music videos and tv shows in iTunes and organise my movies and movie projects in the Finder.