Best practices for keeping big projects from slowing down

Hello Zach

The joys of working on long form can quickly disappear when you run into workflow issues.

Just to clarify, the "master" sequences are each made up of raw footage i.e is each master seq a take?

How many clips are on a master sequence on average?

I am trying to understand the workflow you have set up for yourself before I comment further

Mo

I've noticed that Premiere Pro is good at only one level of nesting.  You can nest sequence A into sequence B, but as soon as you nest B into C, things start to go weird.

That you have every clip in it's own sequence may be playing a part in the slow down.  It's not...normal...to do that.

zachaik5122931,

Neil gives good advice, especially search out Karl Soule's YouTube videos on handling feature film style projects. You definitely are on the right track but one big tip is to offload various project elements to separate project files. If you keep all your sound rolls in one project, your audio sfx in another project, your backup sequences in another project, etc. Then they do not need to live in the current project so it will open much faster. Once you've offloaded project items you do not need access to at all times, you'll start to see your workflow improve, project elements are snappier, less computer resources are used. If you need to access SFX, you just mount up the project and edit items from that project into the timeline. Then, close that project back up. Do a test to see if this works best for you. By the way, this workflow is ever evolving, but it is one used by the likes of Kirk Baxter, Fincher, Coen Bros., Deadpool, etc.

Hope that helps,

Kevin

There's another thread on "theatrical film workflow" that especially toward the end gets to be good reading.

Also, Karl Soule and David Helmly are two Adobe guys that work the Hollywood/long-form side of PrPro for Adobe. And give presentations on how to handle this app in long-form/large-project work.

Dave's TechTable YouTube channel has some info:

dhelmly - YouTube

Karl Soule's blog ...

The Video Road

Check through their stuff, I see Karl has a post on Shared Projects versus Team Projects ... there's other things there.

And in that other thread, and in other discussions, there are three main things to consider:

• Test everything out ... hard. Well ahead of time.
• De-stress the timelines/sequences during editing, save color/fx work towards the end. Consider transcoding any problematic media and of course use exported full media from Ae as soon as you can replace dynamic linked comps with final media.
• Organize, organize, organize.

Along with the above, you need a gate-keeper setting workflow, practices, protocols ... and keeping everyone on the rails. No one updates/upgrades anything on their system during the project without approval, all that sort of thing. Or every simple little thing becomes a huge mess.

Neil