Changing absolute paths to relative paths in Premiere... ?

[BurrFam]

I have found some similar questions to this elsewhere in the forum... yet, no helpful answers. I have a feeling what i want to do is not possible, but I'm going to ask anyway.

Q: I make premiere templates for my team to use when creating videos for our clients. Each respective team member has a different way that they like to organize their file structure. I would like our templates to pull linked media from relative paths only as opposed to absolute locations. Is there any way, in the current version of Adobe Premiere, to change the media links in my templates so that they're relative paths?

Example:

Bob works on his projects at "c:\projects\Bob's Files\Video\"

Melinda works on her projects at "c:\projects\Melinda's Files\Video\"

While they both have different absolute paths... (Bob's Files vs Melinda's files) the way they work with their files is the same; All media files have the same names... e.g. image.jpg is always image.jpg, and they always store every media item they're working with inside the same folder as the project template. Thus, if my template could just say Premiere, search for media links here :   "...\videos\"  - Where the ". . . " is non specific ... then so long as the files always have the same names, then they never have to re-link them when they load the template.

Hopefully that all makes sense.  If not maybe a visual representation would work...

I want this path:

To become this path:

Again, given the searching I've already done around these forums and elsewhere,  I'm almost positive that Premiere will not allow me to do this. But I thought I'd ask anyway.

Thank you for your time!

[BurrFam · Accepted solution]

Hi All,

I wanted to let you all know that through further experimentation, I got this to work appropriately. It's not using relative file paths per se.... but at least it's doing what I need it to do.

Essentially, it looks like (at least in the current version of Premiere) the project file will check the referenced absolute location first, and if it cannot find the files there then the next place it looks is the directory where you're opening your project from. So, as long as every single media file is named correctly, it will indeed find them at the relative path automatically. This will not work if one of your files is named differently, it seems to interrupt the process and then Premiere wants you to double check all the files. Also, I haven't tested if it will try to search other folders outside of your main project directory - I haven't tested that because In my estimation it is unlikely that it would opt to do that vs just having you indicate where to look at that point.

Sorry for the apparently pointless post at this point. But hopefully this will help someone.

[itselijahciali]

Nobody's going to see this, but it helped me out!

[malkazoid]

It helped me out too, by giving me an inkling of what the RelativePath token in the project xml file probably serves for.

I am now thinking it works as a fallback path if the FilePath doesn't lead to the file anymore.

If anyone knows better, please chime in.

I'm likewise interested in how the ActualMediaFilePath and MediaHistory# tags are used by the application...

[christopho57143731]

Cool that it works! Maybe you can add a small step by step explanation how you did it, otherwise this thread helps nobody 😞

[emdiar]

Thanks for figuring that out!