Adobe Bridge can be used to arrange your video resources in a storyboard fashion. This may be especially useful to you if your video editing programs lacks a storyboard capability. (A storyboard is a window where you can arrange the thumbnails of your images and clips in the order you wish them to play in your movie. Storyboards are useful for experimenting with how you want to tell your story with the visuals on hand.) If your video editor does not have a storyboard, here’s how to use Adobe Bridge for the same purpose:
In Adobe Bridge, open your movie resource folder. Inside that folder, drag and drop the images in the order you wish them to play in your movie. Then, under he Tools menu select “batch rename.” Check the “copy to other” button, and navigate to a folder you have already created, or make a new folder by clicking the “Make a New Folder” button. Why copy the renamed files to a another folder? Because you may wish to preserve the original file names, and you also may wish to have those names available in case anything goes wrong in the renaming.) Next, under the New Filenames heading select “Sequence Number.” In the box just to the right of that, type 01 or 001, depending upon whether you have fewer than 100 files in the folder, or more than 100. This will set the first number in the sequence. Finally, press the “rename” button. Now all the files in that other folder that you designated will be named sequentially, in the order you wish them to play in your movie. When you import those sequentially renamed files into a video editor they will automatically deploy on the timeline in the order you arranged them in your makeshift storyboard in Adobe Bridge.
Adobe Bridge is also useful for logging your video resources. Professional film makers log their video clips and still images, entering EXIF information into them, including tags, that is, internet keywords, which remain embedded in those files at the metadata level. This makes these files easy to find by search strings; and finding what you want in a growing library of images and video clips is crucially important for efficient production.
In Adobe Bridge, here’s how you edit the metadata of images and video clips:
Put all your video resources into the same folder. You might like to name that folder with a project name for your video. In Adobe Bridge, open that folder. You will see the thumbnails of images and clips in the folder window. The clips will not play, but if you have previously played a clip with another application you will no doubt be able to identify what the clip contains by the one frame thumbnail representing the clip. To edit the tags or other EXIF information of either an image or a clip, select it with you cursor and then under File menu select “File Info.” This brings up several tabs for editing various categories of information. Under the Description tab in the Keywords window, enter your tags. Tags are keywords that enable internet surfers to find your material, but they will also enable you to find your own material, stored on your own computer. Under the IPTC tab you may wish to enter other important information about your image or clip. IPTC stands for International Press Telecommunications Council. Professional journalists use IPTC data to make their material more visible to search engines. You might want to fill in the IPTC data for that purpose, or whatever other purpose you might have.