How to convert Premiere Elements .prel files to plain text?

Report · Oct 27, 2018

I have a long movie (hundreds of assets) successfully produced with Elements 15. Now I must move the project to a separate computer having a different folder organization. I intend to change the path references in the prels to their new values using a text utility. I also use TextWrangler to examine them and TextWrangler is able to convert the files to plain text for display as the XML's they really are. However, the actual prel files are somehow compressed and cannot be treated directly by the utility text converter.

Question is: what form of compression is used in the prel files? If I know that, I can preliminarily convert to plain text, then apply the new path references, and finally recompress the result back to the native prel format.

Thank you for whatever information you can provide.

Report · Oct 27, 2018

I don't know that that's possible.

But if you're just moving your project and its media to another computer, why not use the Project Archiver -- which will do just that and maintain the project's links to your media? It's much simpler and in fact it's exactly what the Project Archiver is designed to do.

Report · Oct 27, 2018

Thank you, Steve. I will definitely use the Archiver.

On the other hand, it's certainly possible to translate the native .prel files to and from plain text, because TextWrangler can do it. I only want to know what the compression method is. The info must be available somewhere, again, because TextWrangler knows it. Can you point me to wherever that info can be found?

There's another reason I'd like to know. I want to write a program to analyze the inter-dependencies among all the .prels involved in a large project like mine. That will allow me to easily identify and discard intermediate .prels and their renderings which have become obsolete with respect to the final product. (Many files relate to tryouts which are found later to be unuseable.)

Thanks again!

Report · Oct 27, 2018

I don't know and I don't know where you could get this kind of information.