What to keep, and the day it saves you

The four things per shipped shot

For every clip that made the final cut, keep:

1. The first frame, as a lossless image file.
2. The exact prompt, copied rather than retyped.
3. The model name and version string, plus every numeric setting and the seed.
4. The output file itself, at the highest quality you received.

That fourth item is the primary record, not a fallback. The others let you get close; the file is the only thing that is certain, because providers update models and a seed that worked last month may not work today.

Everything else that belongs in the folder

By the end of a job, the project folder should contain:

project/
  shots.md               # the list, with final takes and durations marked
  quote.pdf              # what was agreed
  approvals/             # the emails approving animatic and key frames
  consent/               # signed releases for any real face or voice
  licences/              # music, fonts, stock — the actual licence text
  frames/                # stills + sidecars, including rejects until sign-off
  clips/                 # every generation, with its settings file
  audio/
  edit/
  exports/
    master_2026-09-21.mp4
    delivered_1080_2026-09-21.mp4

None of this is bureaucracy. Each folder corresponds to a question somebody asks later: what did we agree, who said yes, did we have permission, can we prove the music was licensed, can you change shot nine.

Provenance, which you will be asked about

At some point a client, a platform or a broadcaster will ask what in this video was generated and what was filmed.

If every frame’s sidecar says generated, photographed, composited or stock, the answer takes a minute. If it does not, the answer is a guess, and a guess is not something you want to put in writing about a disclosure question.

The labelling obligations themselves are dealt with in the next module. The record that makes compliance possible is built here, during production, because it cannot be assembled afterwards.

The post-mortem, which takes fifteen minutes

When the project delivers, before you forget:

PROJECT: name, delivered 2026-09-21
Quoted: 30 shots, 4 attempts each
Actual: 27 shots delivered, 71 generations, 2.6 takes/shot
Rejections: face drift 21, background churn 14, motion too strong 9,
            wardrobe colour 5, other 3
Time: stills 6h, generation 4h, edit 11h, sound 3h, revisions 2h
What cost more than expected: reverse-angle shots in scene 3
What to do differently: build the plate first; three attempts, not four

Six lines. After three projects this file prices your next quote more accurately than any rate card, and its rejection tally tells you where to spend your improvement effort, which is almost never where you assumed.

Archiving

At sign-off:

• Delete the reject frames if space matters. Not before: a client note two days after delivery is common and the parts bin is what answers it quickly.
• Keep the master export, the project file, the frames, the sidecars, the approvals, the consent forms and the licences.
• Copy the whole folder somewhere else. One copy in one place is not a backup, and this is the point in the process where people discover that.
• Note an expiry on anything time-limited: a consent that covers twelve months, a music licence tied to a subscription, a model whose terms changed.

Why this is a professional differentiator

Anyone can generate a clip. Very few people can, eight months later, produce the frame, the prompt, the model version, the consent form and the music licence for shot nine within ten minutes.

That capability is what a client is actually buying when they hire somebody rather than doing it themselves, and it is entirely free to provide. It is also what makes a revision a small billable job rather than an unpaid rebuild.

The version that fits on a phone

If the full structure feels like too much, keep three things and you will recover most of the benefit: a folder per project rather than a downloads pile, a sidecar text file beside every shipped frame, and the master export saved twice in two places. Everything else in this lesson is an elaboration of those three, and a project with only those three is already ahead of most freelance practice.

The habit that makes it stick is writing the record at the moment the decision is made rather than at the end. A prompt copied when you use it takes two seconds; the same prompt reconstructed a month later takes twenty minutes and is probably wrong.

Today: write the post-mortem for the last thing you finished, even roughly. The rejection tally is the interesting line.