An(other) advantage of the creative pattern

Our creative system here at JDHQ is in heavy use with production of the upcoming JDU series 'task and project management', seeing me create ID 50092 yesterday. We'll crack that hundred before long.

Previous creative projects -- recording the workshop, say -- tended to sit in their own isolated world. They take up a bunch of disk space, and if you're on a laptop you don't want to (or simply can't) carry those files around forever.

You produce a series, upload the final videos, and archive the original files. So it feels simpler to have all of those files in one folder, and you can just move that folder around.

This is a problem, though, if you ever want to re-edit those videos. To correct a mistake, say. Now you have to get the vidoes off 'the archive drive' and put them back either exactly where they were, which involves you remembering exactly where that was, or you have to re-point your video editing software to their new location. DaVinci Resolve calls this 're-linking the media'.

Neither of us are video editing professionals. This is an exercise fraught with danger that often results in us looking at this dreaded screen. We're not the only ones.

What if the files never moved?

With the creative pattern, the path to the file never changes. It's always (truncated for simplicity)
D25/50-59/50082/file.mov.

What changes is whether the original video files are actually at that location on disk. On my laptop, I've told Syncthing, which keeps our files in sync across the world, to remove those files. Lucy, our editor, still holds a copy.

I'll eventually remove all of these files from both laptops. We say that I'm 'dehydrating' those folders. At this point, launching DaVinci will look like the screenshot above. But the only thing I'll need to do if Lucy wants to edit a video is 'rehydrate' those files, synchronising them across the network from our server in Melbourne.

Nothing changed from DaVinci's perspective. Nothing ever will. Bye bye, red timeline of confusion.

100% human. 0% AI. Always.