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PP and AE archiving workflow?
I’m going to be switching over to Premiere Pro for editing, and I am trying to figure out the best way to maintain a folder structure to include my After Effects projects and potentially my Soundbooth and Encore projects, with all of the assets.
I edit :30 spots mostly, and I use After Effects more than my current NLE. Basically I create video beds, output them, and work entirely in AE, since my spot work is heavy on the motion graphics.
I like to have a folder structure that includes Video/Audio/Images/ Etc. folders and my project files under the one project root folder that AE and the rest of my projects have a relative path to, so I can just archive the whole thing and bring it back at a later time.
Now I’ll have a performance RAID hooked up for media files, and I’ll be working in some flavor of HD. I know it’s not good practice to have the project file on the same hard drive as the media, but in my case would it be fine to create the project folder on the RAID with all of my asset folders and project files residing within, and work from there, so later it would be easier to archive the whole thing off to my server/tape. I’d like to take advantage of the dynamic linking from AE to save me the hassle of outputting separate files from PP for AE.
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3 Replies
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For what it’s worth, here’s our structure…
We have a ‘Projects’ folder on our system drive. Within that we have individual folders for each project. In those we have separate folders for PPRo and AE.
On our RAID we have folders for each project’s media. Not previews, just media. We’ll sometime break the media into separate folders – ‘Video’, ‘Audio’, ‘Graphics’, etc. This isn’t totally necessary, since the bin structure in PPro and AE is more important than the actual disc folder hierarchy. Previews are on a separate drive – these aren’t archived.
On completion, we simply copy the project’s ‘Project folder’ and it’s ‘Media Folder’ to a removable backup drive. It’s sits there for an appreciable amount of time til we’re fairly certain it wont need to be quickly re-activated. After that we burn the entire project to a Blu-ray data disc, or DVD’s if it’s small enough.
If the project needs re-activation, we simply copy the folders back to their respective locations, and they will open as though they’ve never been gone.
Alternatively, we have opened archived projects straight from their removable archive drive. The programs will ask for the location of the media, but you generally only need to point it to the new location of one or two of the files, and they will find the rest as long as the internal folder structure wasn’t changed.
There may be other methods, but this works for us.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
I’m not perfect….
but rather than breaking stuff up into multiple folders…
I use one Media folder
but I’ll name my files with a prefix like:
TXT_
GFX_
SND_so they get lumped together in a filename sort of the folder.
alex
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Any dynamic linked AE comps need to be rendered as clips and put into the timeline to be included in the project manager “distillation” process.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,
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