Last Tuesday I spent nineteen minutes looking for a file called final_v2_REAL.mov. It existed. It was on the drive I expected. It just was not where the folder structure said it should be, because the person who exported it named it after their feelings instead of after the episode.
Nineteen minutes is not a disaster. But we deliver a first cut in 48 hours, and I have watched that same nineteen minutes repeat itself four times in one week across four different shows. That is more than an hour of a working editor's day spent doing archaeology instead of editing. Naming conventions are not admin work. They are the cheapest editing speed you will ever buy.
So this is the post where I get boring on purpose. Here is the naming system we use, why each part of it exists, and the specific failures each rule is there to prevent.
The only real job a filename has
A filename has one job: tell a stranger, six months from now, on a different computer, exactly what is inside without opening it.
That is it. Not to be short. Not to be pretty. Not to record how you felt about the take. A stranger, six months, different computer.
Most naming disasters come from optimizing for the wrong reader. finalfinal optimizes for the person exporting at 11pm. EP047_2026-03-14_CamA_Guest.mov optimizes for everyone who touches it afterward, including the person who exported it, three months later, when they have forgotten everything.
I am blunt about this with hosts because I have to be. The naming happens on your side of the handoff, and by the time a file reaches us, the damage is already baked in. If you want the deeper version of that argument, I wrote about what actually breaks in a file handoff and the naming half is roughly two thirds of the problem.
The shape we ask for
Here is the pattern. Read it once, then I will defend each piece.
SHOW_EP###_YYYY-MM-DD_ROLE_DETAIL.ext
A real one:
RUNHOUSE_EP047_2026-03-14_CAM-A_WIDE.mov
RUNHOUSE_EP047_2026-03-14_AUD_HOST.wav
RUNHOUSE_EP047_2026-03-14_AUD_GUEST.wav
Five slots, underscores between them, hyphens inside them. Nothing else. No spaces, no ampersands, no apostrophes, no emoji, no parentheses, no "copy of".
If a filename cannot survive being emailed, zipped, uploaded to three services, and opened on a Windows machine, it is not a filename. It is a wish.
Spaces are the classic one. They survive most places and then break in exactly the place you needed them not to: a command line script, an FTP path, a URL, an automated ingest. Ampersands break more things than that. Apostrophes in guest names have broken more of my mornings than any codec ever has.
Why the episode number goes second and the date goes third
Because sorting.
If you lead with the date, your folder sorts chronologically, which sounds sensible until you have two shoots on the same day and a re-record from November for an episode that publishes in January. If you lead with the episode number, the folder sorts in publish order, which is the order everyone thinks in.
Pad the number. EP047, not EP47. Otherwise EP100 sorts before EP47 and you will spend a week arguing with your own file browser about arithmetic.
Then the date, in ISO format, YYYY-MM-DD. Not 14-03-26. Not March14. I work from Dubai with hosts in the US, the UK, and Australia, and I promise you that 03-04-2026 means two different days depending on who is reading it. ISO sorts correctly and reads the same in every country. This is the single easiest win in the entire system.
The role slot is where multi-cam lives or dies
CAM-A, CAM-B, CAM-C, SCREEN, AUD_HOST, AUD_GUEST, AUD_ROOM.
Cameras get letters, not names. Not sony, not the one on the left, not bigcam. Letters, assigned in the room, written on tape stuck to the body of the camera itself. A on the host, B on the guest, C on the wide. Same every week.
This matters more than people expect on multi-cam editing. When four angles arrive with four naming philosophies, the first thirty minutes of the edit are spent building a mental map of which file is which body, and that mental map has to be rebuilt every single episode. When they arrive as A, B, C, the map is already built. The editor syncs and starts cutting.
Audio gets the person's role, not the person's name. AUD_HOST and AUD_GUEST stay stable for two hundred episodes. AUD_SARAH is useful for exactly one episode and then becomes a small mystery forever. If you want the guest recorded in the name, put it in the detail slot at the end, where it is a nice extra rather than the thing the system depends on.
Our editors are humans who watch the whole episode, so nothing gets auto-cut by silence detection and nothing gets matched by an algorithm guessing at your intent. That is a feature. It also means the human is reading your filenames, and the human notices when they are good. On a plain single camera show the whole thing collapses to two or three files and you can almost get away with sloppiness. Almost. Do it anyway, because shows grow cameras.
Version numbers, and the word "final"
Ban it. The word final should not appear in your file system. Neither should FINAL, finalfinal, final_real, or final_USE_THIS_ONE.
Use v01, v02, v03. Padded, again. If you need to mark the approved one, mark it in the place approvals actually live, which is your project tracker or the email thread, not the filename. Filenames are terrible at storing decisions because they are trivially copyable and nobody updates the copy.
The version slot goes on the end of the detail field for delivered files:
RUNHOUSE_EP047_MAIN_v03.mp4
RUNHOUSE_EP047_CLIP-03_9x16_v01.mp4
That 9x16 is doing real work. When you order vertical clips at $25 each, you end up with a folder of nine files that are all the same episode at the same aspect ratio and different in-points, and the only thing separating them is a number. Give that number a home in the name and a description in your sheet.
Folders are a naming convention too
The folder tree is just a filename spread over multiple lines. Same rules apply.
- One folder per episode, named
EP047_2026-03-14_SHORT-TITLE - Inside it:
01_FOOTAGE,02_AUDIO,03_ASSETS,04_EXPORTS - Numbered prefixes so the folders sort in workflow order, not alphabetical order
- Nothing loose at the top level, ever
The numeric prefix trick is underrated. Alphabetically, assets comes before footage comes before exports, which is a sequence that matches nothing anybody actually does. 01, 02, 03, 04 matches the order you touch them.
Keep this structure identical on your recording machine, your working drive, and your backup. The whole point of a backup that you can actually restore from is that future you can navigate it under pressure, and future you is stressed and in a hurry.
What the convention buys you, in hours
I do not want to sell this as magic, so here is the honest accounting from our side of the desk.
A well named episode saves us roughly twenty to forty minutes on ingest and sync. On a weekly editing schedule, that is somewhere between seventeen and thirty five hours a year. Not saved in one heroic block. Saved in ninety second slices you never notice, which is exactly why nobody fixes their naming: the cost is invisible and the fix is boring.
The bigger win is not time. It is revisions. When a host writes back and says "the bit at 22:10 where the audio dips," a clean structure means we open the exact source file in under a minute. A messy one means we scrub. Revisions come back the next working day, and I would rather that day be spent on the note than on the search.
Where it really shows is the stuff nobody sees. A lot of the editing decisions that go unnoticed only get made because the editor had time left over after the mechanical work. Naming is how you protect that time.
Where I am more relaxed than you might expect
I am not a maniac about all of this. Some places do not need the discipline.
Asset files are one. Your lower thirds, your intro stinger, your logo lockups. These live in a shared brand folder, get named plainly, and get reused across every episode. LOWER-THIRD_HOST_v02.mogrt is fine and does not need a date. The same logic applies to how you decide between reusable templates and custom graphics: if a thing is built once and used a hundred times, it is a library item, not an episode item, and it gets library naming.
Thumbnails are the other one. They live outside the edit entirely, on a different schedule, usually with a different person doing them. Our sister studio ClickTheory handles thumbnails for a lot of our shows at 8 for $250, and their naming is their own. Trying to force thumbnail files into an editing convention just creates friction at the boundary.
And I will happily accept a messy folder from a first time host who is nervous about the whole process. We will sort it out. I just cannot pretend it is free.
Start with three rules, not twelve. If the full system feels like too much, here is the compressed version. Adopting three rules that you actually follow beats adopting twelve that you abandon in week three.
- ISO dates.
2026-03-14. Nowhere else, no exceptions. - Cameras are letters. Tape on the body. A is always the host.
- No spaces, no
final, nocopy of.
That is it. Do those three and you have removed most of the failure modes. Everything else in this post is refinement.
The reason I care is not tidiness. It is that the difference between a rushed edit and a good one is usually just how much attention was left at the end, and the mechanical stuff eats attention first. Same reason we think about small physical things in the room, like where the cameras sit relative to two people of different heights. Fix it once at the source and it stops costing you every week.
Rename your last three episodes this weekend. It takes twenty minutes and you will feel the difference on the next one. If you want a look at how we structure the handoff on our end, the process is written up plainly on the site, and if your files are already a mess, send them anyway. We have seen worse.