Locating offline clips

[Alan Lacey]

CS 5.5

How do I locate offline clips when using PPro5.5?

Obviously it knows the file path, ‘cos it can’t find the clips! It holds a collosal amount of metadata (reams of the stuff) under clips/properties so why can’t I find the original path to help me relink?

Surely this information is in there somewhere? Anyone?

Alan

FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
G5,MBP,Vista64,XP

[Alex Udell]

Hi Alan….

I’ll assume Windows?

What Changed?
1) did you move media
2) Did you do something that would have changed drive letters?
3) are you using file based media that you didn’t copy to a local drive prior to working with it in PPro
4) Have you moved the project and it’s media into a subordinate folder?

A common gotcha with native media based on folder structures happens when you move the media.
If PPro has lost a link to a piece of media (the path doesn’t exist or it’s just not at that location), it will immediately look in the folder where the project lives,
if it finds one then it will start looking there for other media of the project there.

the gotcha with structured media (that is based on folder sets, like P2)
is that those clips live in sub-directories.

As I understand it,
PPro does not sniff subdirectories for matches and this can cause pain unfortunately.

Again…without detail….it’s hard to say…

but if ultimately you have to open the project with the clips “OFFLINE” then you can copy the file name from the project panel and in relinking paste it to help “find” in a the search dialog.

Alex

[Alan Lacey]

thanks for the quick response Alex.

Yes Win7 64.

I have many projects on the go, sharing a lot with others, and edit with FCP7 (hence the interest in CS suite since the FCPX fiasco) but also Edius and Vegas. I’ve never really got over loosing my beloved Liquid Silver – sob!

I usually set the respective media drives as P:\ however on occasions forget. Other apps are kind enough to remind me as to the paths to the clips so I was suprised recently to find PPro didn’t seem to have this informaton available.

I guess I have to keep a note somewhere when using PPro how the drives are lettered

Cheers ALan

FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
G5,MBP,Vista64,XP

[Alex Udell]

Hi Alan….

I understand that many apps will retain info regarding the previous path.
I guess my question is….if the previous path were there….then the media would relink…

so what I was trying to get at was….what happened to the path?

Are you on a SAN or NAS which could introduce fluctuations in drive letter assignments?

or using removeables?

if so, once you get past the volume letter the rest of the structure should remain relative….

re: liquid….that was a cool box. lots of nice editing features DVE interface, was cool and background rendering. very nice.

I am an ex-edit*or myself….but I’ve been thru many boxes since then. 🙂

Alex

[Alan Lacey]

Hi Alex,

Yes I’m talking about removables. I work in the Medical field and many projects are started by others (medical academics – pretty video savvy) and passed onto me for finishing/polishing.

Started tape to tape, fell out early and permanently with Avid and never liked Prem in the early years, although kept it around from v1 to 6.5 as some ‘clients’ chose to use it. I’ve been recently encouraging those who will listen before initiating projects to try Vegas or pref Edius and put everything relating to the project on a single removable drive that they can then pass onto me.

It’s worked well for more years than I care to remember, but now that the Macheads will move away from FCP, I guess PPro is the most sensible alternativem hence my renewed interest in it. It has come on leaps and bounds since I last played with it, especially now Mercury accellerated, also I’ve always been a big AE user.

Cheers Alan

FlashXDR,XDcamHD,XDcamEX,D9 etc
FCS,AE,Combustion,LiquidSilver,Vegas,Edius,
G5,MBP,Vista64,XP

[Chris Lawes]

Seriously what an unhelpful way to design this software. Am I missing something?

I have about 200 AVCHD Folders (with the full directory structure PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/0000.MTS, PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/0001.MTS, etc..)

All the folders are all named according to date-time-cameraA/B/C-shot-etc. But I can’t rename the MTS files because then they won’t span properly (or even show up in Media Browser in Premiere for that matter!)

So basically I have tons of files called 0001.MTS, and the only way I tell them apart is by what folder they are in.

Recently we consolidated a bunch of AVCHD folders together onto one RAID array, but now all the Premiere Projects have “Offline Media.” The program just says “Where is 0001.MTS?” It does not say what folder it USED TO BE IN!

Now I know that I can open up the .prproj file as .xml and edit with textedit. But we didn’t change only change the drive letter, we also changed what folder the folders are stored in “Drive E:/Consolidated AVCHD Folders/110415-0915hrs-Acam-CU-John” Instead of “Drive F:/Media Crew Files/AVCHD Imports/110415-0915hrs-Acam-CU-John” and various other hard drives that were brought together.
So I can’t just find-and-replace the .xml file and fix my problem. If Premiere would just tell me the previous folder name I would be fine, but it doesn’t have any way to do that that I’m aware of.

Also, if I show it the correct 0001.mts file in one folder, it assumes that all the other 0002.mts 0003.mts etc files that are offline are also from that folder!!! Even if they are completely different sizes and previously were stored in different folders. This is very frustrating as now we have all of our consolidated projects and their associated AVCHD folders disconnected with no way to connect them except manually. And manually would be very difficult and time consuming. How do you remember which 0002.mts file you had placed at 4:22 seconds on the timeline????

I would love to be corrected here and told that I am missing something and this is all user error (please don’t tell me that moving my footage from one drive to another into a new folder counts as user error.) Any advice would be super appreciated.

I like Premiere in many ways, but I thought that the media management would be superior for FCP 7’s (which also was terrible) but this is even worse!

Granted the fact that AVCHD Cameras record every file as the same name 0001, 0002, etc and don’t work well with re-naming or changing the folder structure also plays in here. I thought AVCCAM was a “Professional” Codec, why can’t it assign unique filenames like AVC-INTRA etc?

I’m totally fine with the image quality of AVCHD and the playback quality of Premiere, but managing the footage/names/metadata is a big headache!

-Chris

(Forgive me if this has a whiney tone to it, it’s been one of those days..)