Mac to PC, PC to Mac workflows

[Walter Soyka]

The problem is that Macs and PCs fundamentally represent paths differently, and Premiere uses the paths from the OS as literal strings. PCs have drive letters, Macs have mount points off the root. Network connections are presented differently, too: \SERVERShareName on Windows, /Volume/ShareName on Macs.

Ideally, Premiere Pro would understand the differences between the file systems a little better and compensate for these differences itself.

Back in the real world, keeping the same relative path across systems means you should only have to connect one file, and then Pr should find the rest itself. In practice, it seemed with CS6 that Ae was a bit better here than Pr, but now with CC, Premiere Pro’s re-link window is much improved and takes a lot of the pain out of this.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Jeff Meyer]

I realise this is a media management paradigm kind of situation, but Premiere seems to be really good about finding media that’s in the same folder (or tree) as the project file. Something like SAN 1 -> Project -> Project file and media folder live here -> Media lives in a media folder in the project folder.

If you live in a world where projects are isolated this could be a management scheme to keep things online.

Additionally, I’ve found Premiere CC is much better about tracking down missing media.

[Chad Gilmour]

I’m in the same boat with no none fix as well. I have a Windows workstation and 2 macs connected via Fibre directly to a Facillis Terrablock. Everything is offline every time we switch from a windows to a mac and vice versa.

PPro’s auto locate system isn’t perfect. Even though nothing moves, I have to relocate about 10 files for it to auto-locate everything else. It’s better than the alternative, locating every single file, but still a pain. I also agree, AE seems to do better than PPro, could be my PPro projects usually have way more assets than my AE projects typically do.

I hope either Adobe finds a solution or a fellow cow member does!

[Walter Soyka]

Hi Chad,

I had been working on something to fix this for CS6, but I’ve kind of put it down now that I’ve moved to CC. Although I had it working pretty well, I never finished properly testing it.

Can you contact me off-list? I’ll have a couple of questions about your setup, but maybe you wouldn’t mind doing a little more testing with me?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Chad Gilmour]

In case anyone missed it… Facilis’ 6.0 upgrade has a new feature for Windows clients that will mount drives to a “Volumes” folder in the “C:” drive root which allows Premiere to relocate media, even if they are spanned on multiple drives. Everything is still offline going between Mac and PC so Premiere does have to relocate everything, but so far I haven’t had to manually reconnect a single file when my drives are mounted this way. Obviously this only applies to Terrablock owners, but thought I’d post it in here if anyone is still researching this topic.

If you are not a Terrablock owner, maybe there is a way to trick your Windows OS to do this? I tried something similar before, but didn’t work nearly as well as Facilis’ new feature.