Best practices for AI video

Member lesson

Naming and versioning every file

Lesson 4 of 10 in Best practices for AI video.

Checked against the makers' documentation on 25 September 2026.

DATA MANAGEMENT for Film and Video Part 3: Organizing Media and Naming Conventions · chinfat
Video File Naming Conventions | 8 Tips to Get You Organized · MASV
Lesson

Every clip gets a name in one pattern, project_shot_take_model_date, so teatin_sh010_tk01_veo31lite_20260925.mp4 is the first take of shot 10 on the tea-tin job, made on Veo 3.1 Lite on 25 September 2026. Lower case, no spaces. Shots go up in tens so a shot added later can be sh015, numbers are padded with zeros so they sort in order, and the date is written year first for the same reason. Name the file the moment you download it.

teatinproject_sh010shot_tk01take_veo31litemodel_20260925date.mp4the same name + .json beside it:service, model, prompt, inputs, settings, seed, cost, sha256, kept,notesprompts and sidecars in git; video on a drivea name you can sort, and a record you can trust
The anatomy of a clip's name: project, shot in tens, take, model and date, year first; beside each clip a JSON sidecar of the same name records service, model, prompt, settings, seed, cost, hash and whether it was kept.
An ink drawing of shelves of film canisters each with a blank paper tag, and one open canister on a table with a folded note inside its lid.
Every clip carries its own note.
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  1. Question 1, locked

    Which of these words means this? “One fixed pattern for every file name, so the name alone says what made the clip.”

    • Finished second
    • Timestamp prompting
    • Naming convention
    • Contact sheet
  2. Question 2, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A small .json file with the same name as a clip, holding its recipe, its cost and its verdict.”

    • Stop rule
    • Digest
    • Sidecar
    • Settings ladder
  3. Question 3, locked

    Which of these words means this? “A fingerprint of a file's exact bytes. Change one byte and the sha256 changes completely.”

    • Settings ladder
    • Snapshot
    • Order of work
    • Hash

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