Cross Platform Watch Folders in AME

[youngspielburg]

Hello all,

I'm attempting to set up a dedicated export machine in my company's new office. This machine is an HP Z620 (running Windows 10) and will rely on AME's watch folders in order to pull projects export. The files being pulled exist on a network server with there being watch folders for each editor. The editors will put their completed projects in their respective watch folders, which would then allow for AME to pull and export out their projects.

Now, the issue I'm running into with this is the fact that the company runs off of Macs (currently iMacs, not my personal choice, but our CEOs) for editing, thus making the file path to the project and every other associated file completely different than what it would be on Windows. Because of this, early tests of this system yielded the red "Media Offline" screen during the watch folder's export, obviously because of the varying file paths.

My question then is how could this issue be remedied or is there a workaround we could use to get this system to work? We would prefer not to buy a new Mac based machine as that would get extremely expensive and the Z620 is already in our possession. In addition, a Hackintosh setup is nearly impossible with the Z620's hardware not being compatible. I've thought of the potential of scripts to adjust file paths, but Premiere's .prproj extension seems to just be binary code, making it nearly impossible (with my limited knowledge) to alter.

Are there any scripts or pieces of software in existence that would remedy this situation? Thank you in advance; I hope I've explained this in a way that makes sense.

[BB3: Yannick & Hauke]

Hello there,

just stumbled over this kind of outdated thread while having the same problem.

Someone ever found a solution to that?

We have a very powerful microsoft workstation in our network, which we want to use as the work horse to get renderings done via a watch folder in media encoder. The problems seems to be the way mac and windows are handling the filepaths.

[BB3: Yannick & Hauke · Accepted solution]

Somer more info: 10 Gbit Network. Dedicated server with all footage and projectfiles. Several Mac clients for our editors. One Windows machine (Windows 10) in the same network. Connection is made via smb protocol on all devices. On the windows machine the folder / server is attached as network drive with a drive letter, which seems to be essential.

We can open the same  Premiere Pro or After Effects Project on Mac or Windows, all footage is relinked automatically as it should be. 

BUT: If we ssave a project on Mac and copy it into the watchfolder. The Media Encoder (running on the windows machine) starts rendering everything with media offline... WHY?! Reopening the same project on the Windows machine and save it again, send it to the watch folder: everything is rendering fine... There has to be a BUG within the Media Encoder file path handling? 

[BB3: Yannick & Hauke]

Okay. What seems to be working as expected is the following:

On the client mac open the premiere or after effects project you are working on and then save the file directly in the watch-folder. This is the only way the Media Encoder is rendering with linked media. If you hit "save a copy" it will render with offline media. If you just copy the project file to the watch folder, it will render with offline media (unless u opened it once directly on the windows machine before)

Hope this might be helpful for others, who are struggeling with a cross plattform network! 🙂