Naming Convention 3. - Files and Folders 1.

Let's pretend we have a project. A good starting point is to count how many things we have to deal with during a project. Obviously it could be tons of files and data. There are a lot of ways to deal with them but eternal question is "what is what?". So we have something and we have to give a name for that. Considering this we have to define what this something is. What is the reason for this something? For what we are going to use it? Etc.
To answer these questions we have to have a look at our project. That something can be an image file of a concept art or a 3d model or it can be a feedback that our client sent us.
Of course every project is different so we can only talk about it in general. This blog is about VFX-CG so I try to collect ideas about that kind of projects.

First of all we know there are inputs and outputs.
Inputs can be any kind of material which is not created during the project in-house.
Outputs can be any kind of material which is sent to the client, co-workers, off-site studios, etc.

If we are talking about folder structure it starts like this:

IN
OUT

One step back. There should be a solution to identify projects (or shows).
Date is a simple organizer with a project ID.

Definition:
[yyyy][counter][separator][ProjectID]
[yyyy] - year like 2014
[counter] - two digit like 01
[separator] - underscore
[ProjectID] - abbreviated name of the project - exactly 3 capital letters like OBP

For eg.:
201401_OBP (Obviously Basic Project)

So we have:

201401_OBP/
   IN/
   OUT/

Of course we shoud have something called production. We can extend that concept with pre-production and/or post-production.

That is the (first) point where we have to consider importance or priority because we have options to organize the folder hierarchy and there is no ultimate solution as I wrote before. One really important thing is to try to avoid redundancy. For example we can arrange folders like this:

201401_OBP/
    IN/
    PRODUCTION/
        PREPROD/
        PROD/
        POSTPROD/
    OUT/

As you can see PRODUCTION or PROD basically the same but there are two folders with almost the same name. So we can avoid that like this:

201401_OBP/
    IN/
    PREPROD/
    POSTPROD/
    PROD/
    OUT/

Usually this is also called flat vs deep directory stucture.

A typical file system arranges folders like above therefore we should use numbers to add a precise order of the folders like this:

201401_OBP/
    010_IN/
    020_PREPROD/
    030_PROD/
    040_POSTPROD/
    050_OUT/

About using numbers you can read this: Naming Convention 4. - Numbers

To be continued...