Concise naming

- [Instructor] A piece of really good workflow is to label your scenes sequentially in a very ordered, logical manner. It's very easy to be slapdash and lazy about this, and the problem with that is it can blow up in your face in a really big way. Now, one process that I like to use is to have a naming convention where I have the project name at the beginning, then the sequence number, usually like three digits is enough, that'll give me up to almost a thousand versions I can save. I've never gone over that yet, and then an underscore and a description, a text description of what business I've done with that particular version. The reason being I've worked on very long, complex projects and sometimes you can have 150 save states, so it's nice to be able to look back if you make a mistake and go, "What was the last version of this project "that wasn't completely messed up?" Because oftentimes, you will make a mistake, you'll accidentally delete a file, a layer will sometimes go AWOL, and you want to find that again so you can load it back in to the later state and save yourself potentially a lot of work. The beauty of this too, when it comes to cleaning up your files, sometimes I will delete a bunch of them because when I get to version 120, I'm not that worried really about the first 20 or 30 versions. So sometimes I'll just delete every four or sometimes I will save number 1, 11, 21, 31 and delete all the ones in between. That still gives me a ton of save states if I do ever have to roll anything back and that's useful too if you're trying to save space on a hard drive, or Dropbox, or the Cloud, that will allow you to tidy things up pretty well. I do most of my work in Animate CC, formerly known as Flash, Photoshop, and Toon Boom Harmony, and After Effects. Those are my four main programs at the moment. And one of the things I found constant through all of them is the importance of having very good, concise naming conventions. I've seen so many people make needless work for themselves and others with lazy or sloppy naming conventions. Here's one of my files and you'll notice it's very lowercase mostly and it's very concise. I can see everything I've got there and I can slam this closed, I'm not running out of space, I'm not seeing letters run off here, I could even trim that further, I could call the mouth MT, save a bit of room. But you know, M-O-U-T-H is okay for that. So there's a bit of wiggle room in terms of how tight you want this to be, but as you can see, it's clear, I can scan this from vertically and see exactly what I want and where it is. And I've also color-coded the layers. I'm a big believer in using color-coded layers to really clarify the digital information in the files so that I can see, green is right, blue is left, physical right and physical left, and it really helps my brain to parse the layers and to find the layer that I'm looking for a little more quickly. So here's an example of the kind of typical naming convention that I think a lot of people might do innocently, and here's a slightly cleaner one, and here's the one that I favor. Now, the problem with the one on the left is in terms of the spacing of the words, it's jagged and that is going to be a direct hit on your brain every time you're trying to find something because it's having to see these little jumps to scan that vertical stack to try to find anything is a real mess. The one in the middle is much cleaner. It's organizing the entire body by left and right side. That could work for you. Personally though, I prefer the one here, it's got a much nicer structure. I find, more often than not, I want to find the arm, I'm looking for the left arm. Where is it? Come on, brain, tell me. And if I look at the middle stack, the first thing I'm seeing is right. Okay, well, I want the left, left. Okay, left arm, arm, forearm, hand. I'm having to work much harder to find the arm in the middle stack than, for me, the one on the right side. And the other thing to notice too is that with the kind of naming convention on the middle section, compare that to the one on the right side, we are much more compact here, we're actually saving this much room. It sounds like something silly and absurd, but screen real estate is crucial when you're working on a computer and you do not want to be wasting pixels and they really do add up when you have these lazy, more naturalistic naming conventions. So if you get used to a code or a system like this, it's much tighter. Notice, also, I only use lowercase. Again, it's tighter, it takes up less room, and then I save upper case for things that are really important L and R, uppercase for left and right. If I have upper and lower, U or L, or top or bottom, T and B, or M for the middle, those are things I have flagged with one letter, and that also helps to compress. I don't have to waste letters on L-E-F-T or R-I-G-H-T. Uppercase R, uppercase L, and it's done. This has been a nightmare. I remember first hearing about the O zero problem when I worked for Don Bluth in the 1980s in hand-drawn animation, and a memo went out, do not use the letter O on your layers, on your exposure sheets, because if the character was called Oscar, it would be innocently called the layer O1, and the problem would be it would go to the camera department and they might think it's a zero and problems were emerging. And the letter one and the number I have the same problem. Now, this is a real headache, the problem between the O zero problem and the one I problem, because they're graphically so similar, it's easy to confuse them. The solution is fairly simple. Try to avoid or completely avoid using O and I if you're designating layers or parts of a body because it is incredibly easy for things to get confused. And this was a problem even back in the days of hand-drawn animation when the camera department would often confuse layers with numbers when they were shooting scenes and it was catastrophic on one project I worked on where people had used O instead of zero, and as you can imagine, the poor guys in the digital department who got saddled with 4,000 drawings that were incorrectly called O1 when they should have been zero one had a terrible time finding the files. So try to avoid O and try to avoid I for this simple reason. You have this alphanumerical confusion associated with them. Another thing that drives me crazy is when people use the word profile, three-quarter, front to describe the direction that the character is facing in, the reason being it doesn't stack logically. You will end up with your front view under F and your three-quarter view God knows where under 3Q, and then profile P will be somewhere else. Whereas if you label your characters' directions A, B, C, D, E, F, G, then you will know exactly what you're dealing with. It'll take you a little bit of time to get used to the fact A means front, B means three quarters, C means profile, and so forth, but really, it stacks all of your different artwork logically inside whatever software you're using. So please do try to avoid calling things profile, and three quarters, and so on. Find a code, this one or whatever system you like. As long as it stacks logically, alphanumerically inside the program, you'll be great and it'll save a lot of time. You'll be able to find all of your material, your poses, much more quickly. You won't be drilling up and down through layers on a computer.