Premiere taking forever to relink media from OneDrive

IT departments universally give bad advice on video post work. You may need to educate them, noting that video files are not at allI alike unto data files like documents and spreadsheets, and therefore have unique needs and if they have not studing the unique needs of video files in post, they are too ignorant to give you directions.

I work for/with/teach pro colorists, ALL of whom have external drive setups to load the client files into, and remove them at end of job a day or week or two later. And I have NEVER heard of someone with any solid pro level externals having such problems as your iT department suggest.

I have run externals in our own shop for over 20 years, and have never had an issue.

It’s a wonder it would ever work. As ​@R Neil Haugen mentions, it’s really a bad idea. I’m with ​@Averdahl, if you can’t get an internal drive that’s fast enough, then you need an external drive, and make sure it keeps the same drive letter each time it’s plugged in. Internal is by far best, and is what Adobe supports.

OneDrive, DropBox, all of those services constantly update file headers to know when they last synced everything, and those changes in the file header can easily confuse an NLE, which naturally is looking for the exact same file header for the files it is working with.

Unfortunately IT departments nearly universally do not understand the specific nature of video files and computer processing of them. They are trained about moving standard data files, and video files are not built like that. Plus the way video post apps reference and load video files is entirely different in nature.

And all services like OneDrive/Dropbox etc. treat all files as if they are simply data files. With a spreadsheet, the order the bits of the file are accessed does not really matter, and so in reality the files are read in chunks and thrown to the CPU which sorts and displays them as the spreadsheet view and can do that pretty instantly.

Video files need to be read into the system in specific order to be used properly and efficiently, which OneDrive guaranteed does not do.

That’s why standard internal/fast external connections are better for video than normal file transfer systems.

And … LucidLink is an entirely different beast, designed specifically for video post work. Some of my business involves a partner in Cape Town, I’m in Oregon, our files and the projects or Production live on Amazon S3 servers in London. LucidLink sets up a virtual drive system so both your OS and Premiere think it’s a local drive.

And with data speeds about 500Mbps with low latency, you can work this way just as if you were using local storage.