Does anyone really think this media-relinking workflow is acceptable?

[Mobius Strip]

Hi all.

I accept that bugs occur (like the ridiculous no-sound bug that has plagued so many of us). But glaring design defects that go unaddressed for years are simply unacceptable, especially when we pay every month to rent this software.  That money is supposed to be funding fixes and maintenance, and either that's not happening or Adobe's priorities are so detached from functional requirements of working editors that the word "pro" should be removed from the product name.

I wrapped up a rough cut of a program I'm working on, used Project Manager to gather up the source files I actually used, and then color-corrected the video files and cleaned up the audio files. Then I exported them all with the exact same filenames, lengths, and characteristics.

Then came time to relink the project to these color-corrected video and sweetened audio files. What should be a routine function that works flawlessly in any video-editing application appears to be totally unimagined by Adobe and unimplemented in Premiere.  It's just incredible.

The supposed workaround to the lack of this function is to mark all your original source files as offline and then "link media."  This does not work.  Premiere will pretend to relink to the new directory, but then merrily continue to use the OLD files.  Talk about a recipe for professional embarrassment.  And (since Project Manager does not appear to work correctly and include all the source files you used), if Premiere finds that any file is missing from your newly specified source directory, this is your workflow:

At this point the only way I have to finish this project is to manually relink every file in the project, one at a time. Even ones that aren't used in any timeline.  Renaming the old source directory isn't a workaround, because this dialog still results.

When I tell the application to use specific sources in a specific directory, it should never never never just decide on its own to use others.  NEVER.  And yet that's exactly what Premiere does, without even telling you.  There's no excuse for it.

And yes, yes I've "filed bug reports" on this but let's face it: There is no bug-reporting mechanism.  Adobe has insulted us all with an amateur-hour gripe page that it probably took an intern two hours to whip up (you can't even edit your posts).  Someone at Adobe is laughing at us as we waste our time barfing out our concerns onto a Web page that's served by a Pentium 66 in a storage shed behind their parking lot.

[R Neil Haugen]

Total sympathy on the relinking issues. For some workflows/uses it works great. For others you can get by, and for some it's pretty useless.

In my own rig, it has normally worked adequately. A couple times when I had issues similar to yours as far as looking like I'd need to relink them one by one, I just closed PrPro. Removed all the media in the folders used to a copy set, and pasted the modified media with same names in the old spot.

Started up PrPro and it went working away.

Might be of use.

And I disagree about the UserVoice system. Could it be improved? Of course. Don't know of a system that can't.

Having participated in several issues on it, whether I started an issue or posted additional comments, it seemed to work ok. And they have engineers responding to some of the issues directly on that board.

Given the long list of bugs that were addressed in 12.1.2, that's a step forward. And while some of the fixes didn't work for everyone (example: Lumetri scopes causing crash) they did for the vast majority of users. A couple engineers have even been on this forum in follow-up with those still hit, asking for details, project files and media where possible, and in a couple instances seemed to have been able to replicate that particular user's problem.

Once replicated, a fix is possible of course.

And given how dead this forum has been since the 12.1.2 release  ... way fewer posts per day than about any time following a major bug release  ... I do think they've actually released a major improvement.

That naturally still has issues. Including the entire project management system, whether it's the online/offline relinking or consolidate and transfer which again works well for some uses and very poorly for others.

So, I do suggest filling this on the UserVoice system may well help get more traction for fast improvements in that part of the app. We've got big improvements in a few areas, it would be good to get this working for a lot more uses.

Neil

[Mobius Strip]

Thanks for the reply, Neil.

Good observations about activity in the bug forum.

But still... it's pretty woefully implemented. What kind of forum won't let you edit a post? And there's no distinction between "ideas" and bug reports. And the voting mechanism is of limited value because there are so many duplicate reports.

[R Neil Haugen]

Yea, room for improvement, eh?

But it's been SUCH a vast improvement over the Black Hole that the previous system was, that well ... I'll give them a bit to make this one actually more useful. As long as it does get more useful ...

Neil

[Kevin-Monahan]

Mobius Strip,

Does anyone really think this media-relinking workflow is acceptable?

No. It should be much more robust. I have some trouble along these lines too. In my case, I can't relink to existing render files if my drive doesn't get unmounted properly or similar.

Is this your bug report? bug report: "Link media" is broken, links to wrong files. – Adobe video & audio apps
I will make sure this bug is annotated with this forum post and will advocate on your behalf, if I can (I'm not a developer).

Thanks,
Kevin

[Mobius Strip]

Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate it.

Yes, that's my report.  There's another guy who's basically complaining about the same thing but he describes it as wanting to turn off auto-linking. Auto-linking is one aspect of this overall problem; and if you think about it, it really is the most threatening to our work and reputations because it silently brings wrong material into your project.  Anyway, I cross-linked my bugs and his in their comments.

I understand the challenges developers face with an ancient, sprawling, multi-platform code base like this. In making suggestions, I'm trying to avoid those that require major re-engineering (as far as I can speculate). But this is killing the product for some of us. I don't have days and days to waste while my clients wonder WTF is going on, and opportunities slip by.

Here's another clip of incorrect file relinking. This must be fixed: