Is there a recommended process to convert a Production into a 'full' standalone project?

I'm having this same question. I have many episodes of a single series in one Production (as well as several shows organized in the same manner). I'd like to archive old episodes to make room for new ones. Episodes share branding material, and some footage (mainly recap from previous episodes) across projects.

After reading all the comments here, it seems to me, maybe the simplest and safest way to do this is to duplicate the Production itself, save the original Production in the archive, and then clear out old episodes from the new (duplicate) Production.

Not a perfect solution, I must say. Does anyone have any better ideas, or reasons why I shouldn't go about it this way? 

Thanks!

I'm glad to hear your first test with Productions went well!

The process of migrating a Production back down to a single project should actually be pretty straightforward. Here are the steps I would take:

1. Make a duplicate of the Production folder as a backup, since the following steps basically deconstruct the whole thing
2. In the production, create a new project that will end up as your fully self-contained .prproj at the end. I'll refer to it as "master" for now
3. Identify any of the projects in the production that have things that need to be moved over and open those projects all at once. I'm thinking for purposes of archiving a finished project, this would be all source master clips and any sequences you want to keep.
4. Go through each of the projects you opened in Step 3 and drag/drop the master clips and sequences into the new master project, making bins in the master project and organizing as you go to maintain however much structure you like
5. When all has been moved over to the master project, do a File > Save All and then close the Production.
6. Go on disk and locate your master project and copy it outside of the production folder
7. Open the master project and inspect it. It should be self contained at that point

The only need to use the Generate Master Clips command would be if you realized you forgot some clips that are in a timeline, but technically if you are thorough on steps 3 and 4 that won't be a problem.

Let me know if that works or doesn't make sense. The key is as long as you do all that combining while all the projects are open, Premiere will take care of essentially undoing all the links across projects and you will end up back with a single self-contained project. It's essentially the reverse of the steps in the documentation to break apart an existing project, but you can selectively leave behind old dupes of sequences, etc, that you don't want to combine.

Part of the question about this may lie in assumptions or expectations.

It took some time of working within a Productions workflow for me to fully realize how massively different this process is. It isn't just a 'take the organization from a project and put some in folders and link the projects' bit of sleight-of-hand, based on the old stand-alone project files. If it were, then I suppose "shrinking" a production back into a project file would seem like a natural reversal.

Productions and stand-alone processes and workflows are different from the very core of each process.

You do have to accept that statement, and completely abandon the concepts used in stand-alone project workflows while working in Productions. And to get "there", I suggest thinking about this from the concept of The Job, not The Project.

Define The Job ... whether it is a single specific job for a specific client, all jobs for a specific client for a year perhaps, or all jobs for a small shop for a year. Create your Productions organization to best work within the Job as you have defined it.

And none of the above paragraph was ever possible with an old-style stand-alone project file/process.

Stand-alone projects are based on the metadata within the project file.

Within the old-style stand-alone process, the entire organization of the Job you are working on is based on two things: the organization you created in setting up bins for assets within the project, and the metadata that Premiere gathers from your bin organization and from ingesting those assets. None of that information is available outside that project file.

This is why when you have two project files open and drag/drop something from one project file into another, Premiere completely duplicates all of the copied assets and all metadata for them from the one project file into the other.

Production Jobs are built on the on-disc organization of the folders within the top level Production folder, combined with the linked metadata of all project files included in that top-level production folder.

In a Productions process, Premiere is not dependent on the metadata within each project file of that process to encompass all metadata for that entire process ... that Job. The metatdata is spread around through all the linked folders and project files of that productions process.

Remember, we are actually now working with project files that are the equivalent of a single bin in a stand-alone project file process. So even a medium sized Job can have 50 project files between those used as simple bins and those actually housing sequences. Where you had a top-level bin for Media with maybe 10 sub-bins, now you have an on-disc folder for Media project files  ...  and that folder includes ten project files, each holding only what each sub-bin had held before.

This enables the program to run with far less metadata loaded to memory/cache at any one moment. And at the same time, allows for a far deeper and broader organization of an editor's work within Premiere.

But there is no natural route for migrating all that diverse and diffused data down into one old-style project file. How would it have any idea which project files should become bins? Which project file should be the job project file? There are so many ways each user can organize their work, and can organize different parts of a job differently.

And as the entire approach to working within Premiere is changed, so is the archiving process.

Yet in some ways, it's the same. You archived a Job before, when each Job was it's own project file. Now you archive the Job as a Productions folder-set. You're still archiving The Job. But that Job is structured differently.

Neil

I still don't get the why ... and I did understand the bit about archiving. I just didn't understand what you expected to gain by reducing a Productions process into a Project file. There's a lot of differences there that aren't necessarily obvious. I can't see any 'saving' to be had by the time spent working on it.

One of the expectations with a Production workflow for those using them as a single-job process, is that you simply move the Production folder to the archiving location.

That's why I asked.

Neil

I'm puzzled at the idea, actually. I just don't get the "why".

The entire point of a Productions workflow is to split things up so the entire job works better. That's if you work one job per production. It's a reorganization model, one built to scale from medium to massive jobs. And the organization model of a Production simply cannot be replicated in a single project file.

Why would you want to combine everything?

Neil

Read their suggested workflow/manual pdf file ... they directly detail the process to create a stand-alone project file from work done in a Production process.

Start with their Productions page, including downloading the download file they include.

Neil