Opening production prproj with one sequences takes over 7 minutes to relink all footage. Every time?

[Joost van der Hoeven]

I have a Productions issue: A client of mine has a 4 year old Production of a documentary. They are in the stage of 'stitching together' various pre-edits to a master sequence. I’ve helped them fixing duplicate ID’s in the production. We have created a separate project with only the one big 1h40m sequence. All footage references to various prodcution projects. In the prodcution folders, in the finder, there is no footage. Editing works fine. Swithing between proxies and original has a delay, but is olay. But opening the project with just this sequence takes way to long relinking. Even after a save.

Tech info:

• All footage and projects are on a Q-nap server connected over 10gBit (write 500 MB/s read 900 MB/s.
• All footage has ProRes Proxy proxies.
• All footage is 25 fps and UHD of various flavours/sources mostly MOV and MXF wrappers. Some BRAW. Hence the proxies.
• Premiere Pro version: 23.2
• Mac Studio with 32 GB ram (I suggested that ideally they need more RAM)
• Apart form some input LUTS there is no effects.

Bug: Opening the project with just this sequences takes over 7+ minutes to relink all footage. Every time.

Workaround: When I created a regular, stand alone project, with all media in it, the relinking time is negligible.

Question: why does the relinking take so long in a production? Does 23.3 improve this?

FWIW: Media manager calculates that this 1h40m sequences uses about 4.6 TB of footage.