Media Manager is broken

Hello ! 

About the Project Manager issue, here are the main things you could try to have a successful consolidation (from the forums posts, it seems that it solves main issues). 

• Do NOT include Audio Conformed Files
• Do NOT include Preview Files 
• Remove special characters in your media filenames 
•  Move your sequence to a new fresh project

Otherwise, there are some limitation in the Project Manager if you are using some special PPro features (like Dynamic Link AE comps, Aegraphics, Merged Clips, maybe subclips too, ..).

If you want a better way to consolidate your project, you can try PlumePack : it's a third party paying plugin working in Premiere Pro. It gives you full details about what PlumePack does for your project : before consolidating (so you can tweek the parameters as you want before launching) and after (as a final result to be sure everything was ok). It has a special feature to trim your files without re-encoding : you keep the same codec, quality, metadata and Source Settings but with smaller files (from the use on your timeline). It makes it easier to transfer ! You can try to run the analysis for free (before buying a license) to know what PlumePack should do on your project (depending on the options you set). Note : if you have H264/H264 files, tick the "Trim New Codecs in Beta" option ! More infos on PlumePack here : https://www.autokroma.com/PlumePack 

Best,

Nicolas from Autokroma

I personally never have luck with Project Manager. Maybe if it's something super simple. A feature film? I'd be amazed. I'm lucky if I get a 5 minute video out of it, and I've never been able to quite figure out what makes it fail.

This doesn't exactly apply to your situation right now, because people are often looking to use Project Manager for archival purposes, but I've taken to using Render and Replace for everything in my timeline when archiving. It's a bit more manual, but I actually like that I can maintain an organized folder structure instead of everything being (to borrow your word) unceremoniously dumped into a single folder. Maybe something to keep in mind for future workflows/archival purposes.  

I'm sorry this is more commiseration than a solution. I've got thoughts around XML's or creating a new project and importing only the required sequences into that, but the problem is in the transferring of the used media from one place to another.

There are unfortunately a TON of "oh, didn't you know this?" things when working with the project manager. It has had issues with cutting RED files, BRAW, and for gosh sakes do NOT include audio previews/pek files and such.

Neil