Change footage link from one Production to another Production

[bobbih]

Hi folks, thanks in advance for your help.

We have been working across two studios for 8 months thanks to lockdowns and state closures, a joy I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with. Now, we are all finally all back in a single studio completing the offline on a feature length documentary.

Using the Productions workflow to manage multiple projects with multiple editors has been fantastic, however we're hitting a snag I can't think of a work around for.

We have two Productions, one maintained in each studio location, one two different servers. Now we want to work from the master Production that has the most up to date rushes and selects. Using the project import function, we have imported and reconsiled all the projects into the one single Production.

We have within our Production monthly projects for rushes and selects, and then we cut scenes (as individual projects to keep things small and manageable) from these rushes and selects projects.

Here's my problem - any timelines from the old Production keep relinking back to the old Production's rushes and selects project, which makes sense as there isn't a way to change this detail, so why would it. But how do I change that link? Short of the old method of opening the Prem Project as an XML (which is now far more difficult thanks to gzip encoding), I can't think of a way around. Conform shouldn't be affected as the RAWs directories are the exact same between both, it's more so a housekeeping problem and, also, I'm curious as to the solution. Also, it's a pain when hunting back through selects that a whole new project needs to open when its twin is already open in front of me. 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I'm really happy with the Production worlflow so far, although some additional training from Adobe would be appreciated to standardise a pipeline. Working out this kink would only continue to prove the viablility of this tool in the long-form bluechip market.

[mattchristensen · Accepted solution]

@bobbih First of all glad to hear Productions has worked well for you! The good news is that there is a built-in function to do exactly what you're asking for. I'll start with that, and then end with how to avoid needing to do this in the future.

The command you're looking for is called "Reassociate Master Clips..." and it's in the Edit menu. If you imagine a production with a Proj A with master clips and a Proj B with a timeline with those clips in it, the Reassociate command would break the link between the clips in the timeline in Proj B and the clips in Proj A. Instead it would "reassociate" them with those clips in a different project. The Reassociate command gives you a file browser to select a .prproj. Premiere will open the project you select, and if it can find matching master clips, it will reassociate your timeline clips to point to that new source project. So you can select all the clips in your timeline, and run "Reassociate Master Clips" and point to a project containing the clips. Any that don't match (aka not found in the new project) will be left alone. So if you have, say, 10 source projects, you can select all the clips in your timeline and just run the command against each project, and they should all match up.

Tip: make a backup of your production folder before starting this, just in case (easiest way is just ZIP up the production folder and put a time/date stampe in the filename).

How can you avoid this in the future? Have Editor A import new footage into a project, organize it, then send that project to Editor B. Don't have Editor B also create their own project. That way both Editor A and B are cutting from the same exact source projects, and then later when you merge the production you won't have to do this Reassociate step.

Also in case you weren't aware, there's a full-length PDF documentation of Productions and various workflows here: http://bit.ly/PremiereProductions

[bobbih · Accepted solution]

Hi Matt, thanks for the quick response!

Firstly, thank you for the workflow doc, exactly what I needed.

Secondly, I'll be running our timeline through the master clip reset right now. Great tip for archiving projects too.

Thanks again!

[patricks5082286]

@bobbih, did the "reassociate source clips" work for you?

[bobbih]

It sure did. On another project we had a similar issue where we rebuilt our rushes projects for speed and ease of use, reassociatong the clips worked but it took a while to do. We would select everything in an edit project, and then go through all the shoot block projects one by one and reassociate, eventually all of the rushes were pointing to their new shoot block project.

Time is money, we probably lost a week in offline doing this, and it wasn't seamless. Best to set up a workflow from the get go, but we don't always get that luxury hey!

[patricks5082286]

I still haven't been able to make it work, no idea why. I select all the clips in a timeline (command+A), select Edit > Reassociate Source Clips..., choose my original Footage project, it opens, but then nothing changes. These are two projects that originated in the Production and one that's newer than the other.

I'm working in a Production in Premiere 2022.

[Andy Adkins]

This is great - but is there a way for Project B to reassociate all its timeline clips in one swoop? (instead of just the ones selected). Sometimes there are lots and lots of timelines!

We have a situation where an editor had been logging all day in a production project (let's call it projectX) but she had to "save as" outside of the production (let's call that projectY) due to a networking issue that prevented her from saving normally in the production folder. There are are several other projects within the production that reference clips in projectX, but now projectY is the most up to date. And we're talking about many dozens of sequences with clips that point to projectX. How can I re-associate all those timeline clip instances to projectY?

What I've found is that there isn't much going on behind the curtain here in terms of these linkages, so you can just delete projectX and replace it with projectY in the production. Make sure it has the same name and path. Backing up the production first would be smart. Do all of this outside of premiere (w/ premiere shut down) in your OS file browser, if that wasn't obvious.

On the one hand, this is great. An easy fix. On the other hand it makes me a little nervous because it seems not super well thought out, and there are likely more complex versions of this problem where this easy file/project replacement fix wouldn't work. Productions on shared storage is wonderful, but that inherently means occasional "offline" situations due to network issues, server downtime, authentication issues or whatever. So I can imagine this kind of thing happening now and then, and a solution to this problem that doesn't invlove a gazzillion clicks for a big project seems important.

Extending the existing funtionality to do a simle loop though all clips in all timelines and re-associate seems like a great start to make this more robust.