[Bart Nagel]

Thanks for responding, Robert.

In my case, I don’t actually mind if the files are rewritten. So maybe the panel is the way to go in my case. To be sure I’d have to look into what’s possible and what’s not.

It might be interesting to know in fact which video formats XMP is *not* supported. Part of my workflow will possibly be a remux (or transcode in some cases) and I could potentially target a container format where Premiere would always use sidecar files anyway, as long as it supports the codecs we need. Do you have any idea what sorts of formats those might be?

[Bart Nagel]

Robert, did you ever come up with a solution to this? Or has anything relevant changed in Adobe Premiere in the time since this discussion? I have almost exactly the same use case as you.

In order of preference:

1. I want to provide XMP sidecar files for video files (even ones which support XMP) so I don’t have to rewrite the source video files while they’re in storage in the cloud, and then when imported to Premiere the metadata will be found in the sidecar. I don’t care if at that point it’s then embedded in the video source file. I’d rather not have to instruct the user on making the video files read-only, but can do that if it’s necessary.
2. I want to provide metadata to some import function which already exists in Premiere. I can provide whatever format it wants.
3. I want some existing plugin/panel for Premiere which can take a metadata file (XMP or whatever; I can produce something else) and have it import the details into the corresponding video (whether by matching filename, or to one chosen interactively by the user, or some other way).
4. I could write something like option 3 above if it’s feasible in a sane amount of time.
5. I could give up and write XMP to the files in the cloud with a worker script which downloads them, writes metadata to them, then reuploads them. Some of these files will be huge so I’d really rather avoid all this data transfer. Plus this would be necessary either every time a user edits the metadata in my database, or right before they decide they want to download the video file from storage (which would incur an annoying delay).

Did you learn anything which might be of help?