Every still you keep is a part you do not have to make again

The phone call that makes this matter

A project delivers. Six weeks pass. The client asks for one change to shot nine: the jacket should be navy, everything else stays.

If you kept the still, the prompt, the seed and the model version, that is twenty minutes: open the still, recolour the jacket, regenerate the clip, drop it into the timeline.

If you did not, you are rebuilding shot nine from nothing, in a world where the model has been updated, and you will not match the eight shots around it. That is not a revision, it is a reshoot, and you cannot bill for it because you already delivered.

Everything below exists to prevent that phone call from being expensive.

What to store next to every frame

A still is not a file. It is a file plus a sidecar. For each frame that gets used:

• The image at full resolution, in a lossless format. PNG or WebP, not a re-compressed JPEG.
• The exact prompt text, copied not retyped.
• The negative prompt, if there was one.
• The model name and its version string.
• The seed and every numeric setting.
• The source: generated, photographed, composited, or repaired from another frame.
• If it was repaired or composited, the layered file as well.

A plain .txt or .json file with the same name as the image is enough. Do not put this in your head, in a chat history, or in a tool’s own gallery: tools lose histories, accounts get closed, and chat scrollback is not a filing system.

A folder layout that survives

Nothing clever. Something like:

project-name/
  shots.md                 # the shot list, one line per shot
  frames/
    s09_first_v3.png
    s09_first_v3.txt        # prompt, seed, model, settings
    s09_first_v3.psd        # layered, if repaired
    s09_last_v1.png
    s09_last_v1.txt
  clips/
    s09_take4.mp4
    s09_take4.txt           # which frame, which model, which settings
  audio/
  edit/

The naming convention matters more than the structure: shot number, role, version. s09_first_v3 sorts correctly, reads unambiguously, and tells you at a glance that there were two earlier attempts.

Avoid final, final2, FINAL_use_this. Everyone has lived through that and nobody has ever benefited from it.

Keep the rejects

This is the part people skip and later regret.

A rejected still is not waste. It is a parts bin. The generation with the ruined composition but the perfect hand is where tomorrow’s hand comes from. The one with the wrong light but the right face is a reference image for the next attempt. Because they came from the same model with the same prompt family, the pieces actually fit: same colour response, same grain, same rendering of skin.

Keep them in frames/rejects/. Delete the whole folder when the project is signed off, if you must, and not before.

Reuse across shots, and across projects

Within a project, the same still often serves several shots: a wide used once as a first frame and once, cropped, as the end frame of a push-in. A background plate reused with a different subject composited in. An establishing frame reversed for a matching shot from the other direction.

Across projects, a small personal library of backgrounds, textures, skies and plates accumulates and is worth real time. Name them by content rather than by the project they came from, or you will never find them again.

The provenance question, which is not administrative

There is a second reason to record the source of every frame, and it is not about convenience.

If a client or a platform later asks what in this video was generated and what was filmed, the honest answer has to come from somewhere. A frame library where every item says generated or photographed or composited answers that question in a minute. A folder of untitled PNGs does not.

Labelling obligations and disclosure rules are dealt with properly later in the course. The record that makes compliance possible gets built here, during production, because it cannot be reconstructed afterwards.

The free path

All of this is folders and text files. No software, no subscription, no database. Version control is optional and generally overkill for binary media, though a plain copy of the project folder at delivery, stored somewhere else, has saved more projects than any tool.

Today: take the last shot you generated and write its sidecar file from memory. Whatever you could not remember is the field that goes in your template.