Premiere Pro Project Manager bug?

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

It is probably more space saving (though not easier, some things just aren’t easy) to try it this way instead:

Make a folder for each project on your SAN and copy all your existing material for the project into it (it will make your life a lot easier if you remove any subfolders at this point and put their contents directly in the main project folder). Then simply open the project and point to the media to relink it – then resave. You’ll have no duplication of master clips, and without subfolders the relink should be relatively painless.

slainte,
marisu

[Mike Chapman]

…that’s actually what I’ve been doing, but that gets tedious when you have to go hunting for something that wasn’t placed in the right folder (I know, I know…we’re slowly instilling proper media management technique to the troops.) I was hoping there was a hidden check box or a setting that would treat subclips as, well, subclips! Anyone tried this yet in V3?

Meantime, thanks for the reply!

Mike

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

The only success I’ve had with that is by trimming the project in project manager(actually, to get it to work reliably I usually have to first do a “copy only the used stuff” to a new project and THEN trim it – that gives me success 90% of the time, the other 10% it just crashes and copies nothing no matter how long it’s been working on it).

Hopefully some of these things will be better in 3.0 (which is just around the corner). Wish I knew of a better way, these days it sometimes feels like I’m spending much more time moving files and doing media management than I get to spend editing!

slainte,
marisu

[Mike Cohen]

a few months ago I spent a whole day trying to project manage one project. It kept crapping out, and being a Windows program gives no details on why it stopped. I made multiple copies of the project, isolating selected sequences, deleting other sequences, until I had new projects for nearly all of the sequences. Only problem is, it took up almost as much space as I was using before. With the cost of drives, I decided to leave it alone.

When I project manage a smaller project, say a 15 minute edit with 3-4 hours of raw footage, that usually works fine and give me a nice compact project. But really big projects seem to bring Premiere to a halt.

I suspect the engineers who design these programs never make really complex projects to test the program.

Regarding moving to another drive, re-linking seems to be the norm. Even when I have not transferred to another drive, I need to make sure my drives always come up as the same Letter, or else Premiere acts like it can’t find anything and sometimes needs to re initialize the audio, which takes forever.

There is a good post on this blog talking about backup up stuff. The author backs up everything, which I think I will start doing, given the age, time used and heat generated of some of my drives.
https://lfhd.blogspot.com/

Mike Cohen

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

I back up EVERYTHING – projects in progress are backed up weekly on separate drives, finished projects get full backups (duplicate sets) on ultrium tapes and then condensed (trimmed) projects onto firewire drives. Although devoting my Fridays to backup/archiving is not my idea of a fun time, paying to have a project recovered from a damaged drive quickly convinced me it was worth the effort.

A tip for the really big projects – first I hand trim them a bit (delete extra sequences and any really unnecessary pieces like old scratch tracks) THEN I copy “used only” to another drive, then finally trim that smaller project to a new third drive. I have found that project manager is REALLY unhappy with subfolders and/or certain project names – so I generally use a stupid name like copy.pproj for the first step and trim.pproj for the second and then just rename the project file to make sense. Like I said, at this point I get what I want about 90% of the time . . .but it took a couple of years of fussing and fuming to get there. Hopefully project manager will work more smoothly in the new version.

slainte,
marisu

[Mike Chapman]

We’ve had a lot of issues with our shared storage system, so we’ve had to bounce projects from the SAN to “bricks” and then back again. It’s been quite a mess. I’m trying to get the Powers That Be to spring for LTO tape back up for the finished projects, but right now they get parked on bricks or on local drives.

I agree – I don’t think Premiere was ever tested with anything more complex than a five minute music video. We’ve been working on half-hour shows with one or two multi-camera interviews, and trying to manage these projects is a job unto itself.

Again, I was hoping it was a setting of some kind to prevent the subclip duplicaton issue. I don’t think the media management part has been well thought out, at least in a workflow that’s needed for large projects.

–Mike

[Marisu Fronc]

Mike-

We couldn’t EVER get shared storage to work properly with Premiere (except as RAID 0, no protection – and who honestly wants to deal with recreating tens of thousands of terabytes of data when there is a failure?!) so we ended up bagging it (after a lot of wasted time and money) and went back to swapping drives and using sneaker-net. Large projects have always been a problem (do a search in this forum and you’ll find quite a bit on large project limitations). However, after a rather intense “trial and error and error and error” period I’ve found workarounds that make the process nowhere near as painful as it initially was . . . but I’m certainly praying for improvements in 3.0 none-the-less. Good luck!

slainte,
marisu

[Mike Cohen]

Regarding Premiere testers using small projects, it is interesting to note that at Adobe’s NAB booth, the guys demo-ing Premiere CS3 were basically showing one feature at a time, using generally 1 track.
At Blackmagic’s booth they were running scenes from movies out of Premiere 2.0 into HD monitors, I guess to show that it can be done, but again, nothing complex.

It would be great to see Adobe create a full hour show on a sequence and try to use that in a demo without a freeze, lockup or other headache.

Again, normally Premiere works great, this thread seems to be about Adobe not putting it through its proper paces.

We all have one or more of these attached to our computers
https://www.cooldrives.com/esata-usb-enclosure-removable.html

You can put any size hard drive in them, and swap the drives easily. Each major new project gets a drive, we seem to order 4 drives and they get snatched up instantly.

I am determined to get a 1 TB drive just to use for backups.

Funny to think we once ran a Media 100 with 2 9gig drives.