Can you manually lock closed project in Productions?

[David23692725rhli]

Is there a way to manually lock a project inside of Productions without having it open? As an assist editor, I want my editor to have read-only access to all non-essential projects, so that if they are the only one inside of a project they can't write over anything.

And also so that I don't have to keep asking them to step out of projects, or change to read-only mode, if they've opened a project before me.

Essentially, I (assist editor) would have read/write access to all projects, but the editor would only have read/write to the edit/sequence projects.

Is that something that is an option, or is that a feature request?

[Bruce Bullis · Accepted solution]

It is not currently an option.

We can call "Provide granular read/write management of different projects, within one Production" a feature request; if you need something near-term, a media asset manager may be your best approach.

[justind4726576]

The lack of this kind of feature is why our produciton company decided against using producitons on an upcoming cable TV series. We can't afford to risk someone moving/deleting/renaming something because we are not able to resrtict their access to the "masrter" project. Hoping Adobe will add this in the future.

[Bruce Bullis]

Productions rely on the OS directory structure to keep track of their constituent projects, including whether they're open (locked). 

To restrict access based on user role / credentials, you may wish to consider a Media Asset Management (MAM) system of some sort.

Anecdotal: Lots of films and shows have used Productions for years, and we haven't received any complaints about access control issues.

[justind4726576]

We have the ability to set read/write access at a finder level (we're on mac), but how does that prevent people from modifying/deleting sequences inside the production?

The production has one parent folder with subfolders that mirror the production panel in Premiere. Are you saying that we can set read/write permission on those subfolders (like one containing edited sequernces) and keep all the other functionality of the production in tact i.e. Premiere isn't going to freak out and crash because some sub folders have been set to read only?

[justind4726576]

CORRECTION: ability to set read/write at the FOLDER level

[Bruce Bullis]

You are correct, different privileges on different Productions subdirectories sounds like an invitation to mayhem. 🙂 

I would recommend a MAM, over fiddling with privileges. 

You wrote "sequences inside the Production"; did you mean "sequences inside a given Production project"? 

Adobe Team Projects offers sequence-level locking; Productions offers project-level locking.

[justind4726576]

Yes - sequences inside a project.

There are sequences for day masters (sequences containing one day's footage and only intended to be copied from, not edited with). There are editor sequences that contain the actual edits of said content. There are sequences strictly for b-roll footage or still images, etc.

If we have upwards of 10 different story producers and editors accessing a project at any given time and all are working on different scenes and/or taking elements from other sequences to integrate with their own, how do we prevent something from hitting the wrong key and deleting something by accident?

In 17yrs of delivering content for US broadcast, we've never used a MAM. Please provide an example if possible.

[justind4726576]

Your first response to the original question was to make a feature request and now you're saying to use some other software to accomplish the task... Whish is it?

[Bruce Bullis]

Both! 

your feature request has been noted; if you'd like more granular change control today, investigate media asset management software. Most vendors provide panel integration into PPro.

[justind4726576]

The question of how do you prevent someone from modifying/deleting a seqeunce from a project that's not currently locked was never answered.

If you know of a MAM that offers that specific feature, please advise.

[justind4726576]

It seems like the current state of the Premiere Productions workflow is the honor system i.e. promise not to mess with anything you're not supposed to and that's just not secure enough for us.

[BrianDavison]

I will preface by saying this is not supported or recommended by Adobe. But, it's what I use to keep people from inadvertantly opening a project in productions. First, duplicate the .prlock file of a currently locked project, and change the name to be the name of the project you wish locked. Open the newly renamed.prlock file in a text editor like BBEdit or Visual Studio Code, and you should see something that looks like: 

Your project locked username will be where it reads "Locked", change it to "Locked" (or whatever you like) and there you go. No one can get into the project accidentally. If you need to get into it, quickly rename your prlock file so it doesn't match your project name and now you can get into it.

[justind4726576]

Interesting idea, but certainly not ideal or all that practical for a large scale TV show with a big staff and multiple cuts going out on a daily basis.

Real world experiences have proven that we need the ability to protect certain projects in our workflow. We do this now by placing "master" projects on a read-only volume that select clients can write to. To take advantge of what productions has to offer, that kind of limiting won't work.

[BrianDavison]

Definitely not ideal as I'd like to see that functionality built in (or at least maybe the option to change the default open on a project from read-write to read-only), but works well for us within the Production environment. We have 4 or 5 editors and a a couple story producers, so perhaps more people would be a different story. Mostly I'm just looking to prevent people from accidentally messing with the media projects when they shouldn't, and this is exactly what that does, lock those projects on an indivdual basis without needing them to be open.  I'll admit, it is a little bit of a pain to then unlock if you need to get into it.

[justind4726576]

This won't apply to everyone, but we DID find a solution for this via our media server's controls. We have a Facilis Hub:

Policies, or Smart Access Rules, are sets of rules that allow the system administrator to build sets of polies and rules that allow or deny access to certain files, folders or locations within the Facilis virtual volumes. These rules can allow or deny read, write, delete or allow create-only for specific workflows. In addition to folders, rules can be applied to file types. Removing Delete from a file type can protect files from unintentional deletion, while allowing project save operations on these files

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Using those rules allowed us to set the proper restrictions for our master projects and now we are moving forward with Productions on our next project...