# Mewa Film User's Guide/Managing footage
## Managing footage

All footage used by Mewa Film need to be loaded first. When footage is loaded, a copy of the loaded footage is stored in the current project directory. Keeping a copy of project's footage has 2 advantages, first the original footage can be moved or deleted without affecting your work, and second, reduces the time to open an existing project.
Picture below illustrates footage window with 2 clips loaded.
Footage window shows all loaded footage for the current project. To start editing the footage itself double click on the footage item, a montage tab is created with the clicked footage and all changes applied to the footage modify the footage itself. Usually it is better to keep the original footage unchanged and edit a copy of it. To do this create a montage tab first by clicking the button , located at view toolbar, and drag the footage item from footage window to the montage tab. Read more at chapter Editing with Montage.

### Loading footage

At various times during the post-production process, you may need to import footage into Mewa Film.
With Loading Footage dialog it's possible to load single files and image sequences as well. An image sequence consists of a movie stored as a group of still images consecutively numbered.
Image sequences can be expanded into still images pressing the + icon on the top left corner of a thumbnail. By expanding a image sequence you can load single images from a sequence.
Most of the industry-standard file formats can be read by Mewa Film. Each file format uses a default file extension. The supported Image File Formats are shown in the table below,
| File Format | Extension | Depth |
| Bmp | .bmp | 1, 4, 8, 16, 24, or 32 bits |
| Gif | .gif | |
| Jpeg | .jpg .jpeg | 8 bits |
| Png | .png | 8 bits |
| PBM | .pbm | |
| PGM | .pgm | |
| PPM | .ppm | |
| Tiff | .tif .tiff | 8 or 16 bits |
| XBM | .xbm | |
| XPM | .xpm | |
The depth is an important characteristic, it gives information of the width of different colors the format can store.
Keep in mind that it can take a long time to load large amounts of files (or big files) and all this loaded footage can take up a lot of memory space.
Once footage is loaded the original files can be deleted or moved, as Mewa Film keeps a copy of the loaded footage for internal use.

### Exporting footage

After doing some editing to a clip in montage you can export it back. To export a edited clip from montage you need first to send the clip to footage window. Then, to export the clip, from the footage window click (icon) to show the save footage dialog.
Inside image sequence group we have
* Name: This is the name that will be given to every frame.
* File Format combo box: Select the file format of the images.
* Location: The folder
* Add files into folder checkbox:
Mewa Film currently can export only to sequences of still images. Export to the following file formats:
| File Format | Extension | Depth |
| Jpeg | .jpg .jpeg | 8 bits |
| Png | .png | 8 bits |
| Tiff | .tif .tiff | 8 or 16 bits |

### Deleting footage

Removing footage from the application can improve overall performance because it can free a lot of memory. To remove footage:
* In footage window, select the footage to delete
* and click
Footage being used in the node graph (by footage nodes) can not be deleted until all instances of footage are deleted from the node graph.

### Renaming footage

To rename a file:
* Right-click the footage name and select Rename.
* Enter the new footage name and Enter.
There is another way of renaming footage without right-clicking.
* Select the footage you want to rename.
* Wait 1 second and click again on the footage you selected.
* Enter the new footage name and Enter.
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