How would you prefer to archive AMVs?

[SQ]

For those of you who have (or want) AMV archives, what do you think is the information that should be stored with the AMVs?
Or is the actual video file all that matters?

If there were no limitations, would you like to keep the original editor description (especially the really long ones that are on the org sometimes)? Or does a simple comment like a youtube description suffice?

Would you like to keep the URLs of all the places the video was originally found? Its contest participation/awards?

Etc.?

I'm starting my own archive and I just keep getting decision paralysis over it. I used to keep literally everything, but now I'm wondering if some of that stuff is ok to discard.

[Zarxrax]

Do you mean for a personal archive or a public one?
I used to think that having a link to the video info page here on the org was good enough, but more and more people don't even use this site anymore...

[l33tmeatwad]

For my own videos, since they are MP4, I add metadata (using a software called mp3tag) to add a thumbnail, description, year, etc. For other videos I've downloaded, which is not often since most I'm aware of that are available to download are on the org & viewable on YouTube, I also add metadata if it is a MP4 and doesn't have it already.

[ngsilver]

I've struggled with figuring out a good way to catalog and be able to pull details about videos in my archive, which also doubles as the archive we pull content from at conventions that I help out with. I've found over the years my encyclopedic knowledge of videos in my archive is starting to get fuzzy and of course I'm not always around to pull up the name of a video out of my mental rolodex (plus keeping track of over 106 thousand video files, many I'm sure are duplicates, at this point is nearly impossible for one person.) The big thing for me has been ease of quickly identifying videos based on basic details and keeping that within the filename itself. Anything beyond that is often extraneous and not needed in that case. I've toyed with building databases that can more quickly allow for things like user tagging in order to make playlist generation faster. Linking videos to the database entries with some index code to make finding and searching the actual archive quick when pulling specific videos, ect. But most of my efforts regarding this have fizzled due to my own personal lack of will to code in order to support such a configuration (assistance with file renaming for the basic details has been much easier to obtain.)

So ultimately my archive stores videos using a standardized filename for easy sorting: [studio] editor - video title [format/version] [video type tag]

Take my video Inner Dissension, it would appear like: [CB-R] ngsilver - Inner Dissension [HD] [AMV]

Tags could be things like, AMV, LA, PMV, Flash, MV, GMV, CMV, ect
Format/version is mainly for instances where multiple formats are available, such as HD vs SD, mpg vs mp4, 4k, ect

Having other things like video source and audio source would also be great, but you run into issues with file/folder length limits in windows systems real fast keeping all this data in the file name. That's where the companion database would be good to have.

[SQ]

Do you mean for a personal archive or a public one?
I used to think that having a link to the video info page here on the org was good enough, but more and more people don't even use this site anymore...

Both, but mostly a public site.

I keep a personal website of my own video archive. It uses wordpress though and I kinda hate it.
I was looking for ideas on what other people use.

My personal site has (or was intended to have) all the original descriptions, links out to org, amvnews, etc. (if they exist), conventions submitted / awards won, of course the video file itself, but also sometimes there's a whole list of betas that I upload too just for archival purposes.

I might be content to just use the .org instead for everything, except the .org is anime-only I make more than that, and want all my videos in one place.

I've spent the last 2 days looking at various pre-made solutions like file sharing sites, digital file sales platforms, and file management systems.

I think at this point any web-based file sharing platform would work if it just had some extra kind of "details" tab somewhere.
Most of them already do have a description/author comments section, but it's not designed for anything more than a sentence or two.

[Zarxrax]

If you can live with a simple list format, its hard to beat just a simple google spreadsheet. It can even be embedded directly in a page like this: https://www.amvhell.com/?credits

[CrackTheSky]

SQ is already aware of this, but for anyone else reading this thinking, "Oh, hmm, yeah, I would love a good way to keep track of information on all the AMVs I watch", I'm going to plug AMV Tracker. PSA: I'm working on version 2 of this program currently, it will look very different and will be much more customizable than it is right now, but it may be several months until it's ready for release. I'll make a post here when it is, but you will be able to transfer anything you put in v1 into v2, so don't worry about what you do in it now not being compatible with the future release.

[CrackTheSky]

Also, SQ, if you're ok with just having a personal archive, I think all your concerns will be addressed in AMV Tracker v2, just as a heads-up.

[SQ]

Having a website is the main draw lol
I think I finally got my personal archive covered