Evolutions Client Guide: Rollnaming

Rollnaming

What is a rollname?

A rollname is a unique folder name we give to camera and archive rolls.

Rollnames are vital to working in collaborative projects as they allow us and the edit to:

See important information about that folder’s contents
Keep every card separate and unique from all other media

An example might look like this:
EVOS_220512_CAMA_001

How to construct a rollname

Rollnames are made up of multiple parts separated by underscores and are written in UPPER_SNAKE_CASE, as upper case is easier to differentiate in bulk compared to lower case. Rollname structures can vary per project, but generally they follow this rough framework:

Prefix according to the project name abbreviated
Date the card was recorded
Camera the roll came from
The increment of that card for the day. Card increments reset the following day.

In the example above:

EVOS_220512_CAMA_001
EVOS_220512_CAMA_002
EVOS_220512_CAMA_003

EVOS_220513_CAMA_001
EVOS_220513_CAMA_002

EVOS = Evolutions
220512 = 12/05/2022
220513 = 13/05/2022
CAMA = Camera A
001 = Card 1 from A camera for that shoot day, incrementing upwards and resetting the following day.

Rollnaming guidelines

Everything we receive, whether it’s a broadcast camera card or a single pond5 archive screener, all
need to be in a rollnamed folder that has to be unique compared with everything we have received
previously.

Dates in rollnames should be backwards dated – yymmdd or mmdd. This is so the folders sort
alphabetically properly. Both in terms of working with the media and the edit sorting through it,
forwards date media will have the 1st of every month sorting next to each other and so on.

If the shoot spans between two years, then you must use yymmdd. You have the option to use mmdd if you're confident that the media being sent for the run of the project will not span into the next year.

We require rollnames to be in upper case to keep consistency, as mixing lower and uppercase makes
identifying folders in large batches more difficult than it needs to be. Upper case is easier to read in general, especially at a glance.

By nature of how Avid works, rollnames over 32 characters long including underscores will become
truncated (the end cut off) in the Avid bin’s disk label column. All efforts for rollnaming should conform to this character limit.