If you have more than a few videos you should consider setting up your very own video archive. This is no longer something reserved for large companies. If you do it right you can save a lot of time and frustration and its not expensive, if you are working with videos there are money to save.
Organizing video files by keywords is simply not enough. The big timewaster is when you have to spend time watching videos to find a specific scene.
A video index picture should be stored with each archived video in your archive. The index picture should give you an instant overview of the video file without having to open the actual video.
Ideally you want to create the index automatically from the video file. As you archive more and more videos it should be easy to add indexes to your archive.
There are a lot of solutions to archive videos. I recommend you go with a standard solution. If you store your videos in some kind of database you might have problem in the future when the software is no longer available or not available on the operating system you are running.
Store the video as separate file and keep the index pictures in a standard image format and you will have none of these problems in the future.
Fast video indexer is a good program to index your video files. It automatically creates jpeg index pictures from a list of your video files.
Another important thing you should not remember when setting up a video archive it to have a backup strategy. This is a subject to fill a couple of articles. Depending on how valuable your videos are you have to decide on that yourself. I just have two usb drives to store my videos and keep a shadow copy on my computer for the videos I am currently working with.
