Tip Of The Day #060

Tip Of The Day #060

While there are lots of ways you can structure your folders I believe there are better and worse ways. It does somewhat depend on your requirements. I am going to assume you want to keep your folders separate year to year. I also am going to assume you want to keep holidays separate (although you don’t have to if previews provide you with enough).

I am also going to assume you are keeping it in your home documents folder on windows … although this will vary based on OS and again this is not critical.

So my home folder for Christmas would be: C:\Users\<you>\Documents\xLights\2017\Christmas
Halloween would be: C:\Users\<you>\Documents\xLights\2017\Halloween

By keeping the year out of the actual show folder name we let xLights sort out the path issues when we move it between machines.

Inside my show folder the directories I would have include:

Audio – all my music goes here – I would also put videos here I am using for their audio
Video – any effect video I use goes here
Images – any image files I use goes here
Glediator – my gladiator files go here
Import\<vendor>\<sequence> – All my imports go here … that way any images etc I use from them are nicely inside my show folder and don’t break
Palettes – when I save palettes I put them here
valuecurves – when I export value curves they go here
Colorcurves – when I export color curves they go here

I personally leave my sequence files in the show folder itself. Some folks like to create a folder per sequence or just a sequences folder. If you are going to go that route please ensure you turn on backup subdirectories otherwise you may not be getting the backups you expect.