If you’ve ever taken over a Camtasia project someone else built from the ground up, you know how confusing it can be. You open the folder and try to make sense of it. Files are named things like “animation_v3_use_this_one” or “finalfinal.” Layers are stacked without an obvious system. Assets seem scattered. You click on something that looks like a callout, and it turns out to be an elaborate group of animations, annotations, and shapes. 

It’s disorienting. But not surprising.

Maybe whoever built this worked alone, probably under pressure, and maybe without a shared standard to follow. They did what made sense at the time, just like any of us would.

For a while, I thought the first step was to clean it all up. Rename files. Sort the assets. Build folders. It gave me a sense of control. But that rarely helped me understand the project any better. It just delayed the real work, which is figuring out what the video is trying to accomplish.

Now, I try to pause and look for logic before I reorganize anything.

Maybe that means that if I see markers, I ask why they’re there instead of deleting them. They might have been used to create a table of contents for a course player. Or to mark chapters in a longer video. Or maybe the creator used bulk export to create multiple clips from one timeline, and those markers split the output. That would explain why I’m seeing short videos in the folder that don’t seem to match the full project.

When I take the time to understand the setup, things usually fall into place. I can see what they emphasized. What they reused. What they needed to get across.

That’s when I start making adjustments. I might label tracks or group things more clearly to help the next person (which might be me six months from now).

If you’ve ever had your own work deleted or rebuilt because someone didn’t understand it, you know how important this is. That’s why I recommend keeping a light operations doc, even if it’s just a few notes on how your projects are structured or why certain decisions were made. Especially for the stuff that looks messy from the outside but actually has a purpose.

It’s easy to assume you know better when you’re coming in fresh. But unless the person who built it tells you they were winging it, it’s worth assuming there’s a reason. Start there.