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hellopaul4
hellopaul4
Inspiring
October 28, 2019
Question

Manually editing PPro file to relink assets

  • October 28, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 424 views

Hello,
I am having trouble relinking a lot of dynamically linked AE comps in PPro. I thought I'd be able to directly edit the PPro file in a text editor and do a simple find/replace to change the file path of the old AE project to the new AE project, so PPro 'looks at' the new AE project. But that didn't work. So I thought I'd put this out there for discussion in case anyone else can shed some light on the issue.

The problem is that I have many (200+) AE comps dynamically linked into a PPro project, but now want to make PPro look at a different AE project for those comps. Manually relinking in PPro would take ages (the auto-relinking did not work) so I thought I could directly edit the PPro project in a text editor.

I suspected that the relevant chunks of code in the PPro project look like this:

<Media ObjectUID="55748714-7a4e-4905-9fb1-bccef8354c5b" ClassID="7a5c103e-f3ac-4391-b6b4-7cc3d2f9a7ff" Version="27">
<VideoStream ObjectRef="11781"/>
<ImporterPrefs Encoding="base64" BinaryHash="0bca3b82-4957-1c2b-51b0-9ac200000054">MAAwADAAMAAwADUAZQBlAC0AMAAwADAAMAAtADAAMAAwADAALQAwADAAMAAwAC0AMAAwADAAMAAwADAAMAAwADAAMAAwADAA
</ImporterPrefs>
<ModificationState Encoding="base64" BinaryHash="03d2ac93-3577-755a-e0dc-8a1d0000001c">ty5tliroRMKB5VjZIOYD0w==
</ModificationState>
<RelativePath>.\old_AE_project.aep</RelativePath>
<FilePath>D:\Freelance work\old_AE_project.aep</FilePath>
<ImplementationID>ec341e53-60c2-4d89-abfc-bdb5c0ff2e0b</ImplementationID>
<Title>07_02/old_AE_project.aep</Title>
<FileKey>6d29a764-13e1-4db5-b8cb-836fdd056793</FileKey>
<ActualMediaFilePath>D:\Freelance work\old_AE_project.aep</ActualMediaFilePath>
<TimeDisplay>101</TimeDisplay>
<ContentAndMetadataState>966d2eb7-e82a-c244-81e5-58d920e603d3</ContentAndMetadataState>
<ConformedAudioRate>9223372036854775807</ConformedAudioRate>
</Media>

...so I changed all occurrences of the old_AE_project.aep to point to the new AE project (whose folder/comp structure is identical to the old AE project) but PPro then could not find the comps. Is there something hidden amongst the <FileKey> or other cryptic-looking numbers in there, which makes a simple find/replace impossible? Has anyone managed to achieve anything similar to this? I'd be very interested to hear from anyone who has successfully done this!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Richard van den Boogaard
    Community Expert
    Richard van den BoogaardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    October 28, 2019

    I would advise you to use the Automatic Relinking feature, but do this beforehand:

    - Copy all the old comps to a separate folder on your drive (or rename the folder to [name].old)

    - Maintain the same naming for the updated AEP files as the original sources

    - Make sure all AEPs are in the same folder

    - Use relinking feature where you open the new AEP file instead of the old

    > PPro will now find all the other missing files and relink them

     

    I have done this successfully for a client project in which they have asked me to create an alternate language version, with lots of AEP files dynamically linked between PPro and AE.

     

    Hope it works for you too.

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