Migrating a project into a Production - Workflow guide?

[KazuTa]

Is there a workflow guide for migrating a project into a Production? I appear to have done it wrong.

I am migrating a giant project into a Production. I dragged the sequences into several new projects, then dragged the footage into new projects. When I try to "Reveal [a clip] in Project", it wants to open the original, huge project from which I dragged these elements. I can manually open the correct new project, and it reveals the correct clip in that project; but I can't do that for all 30,000+ assets in this production.

Is there a way for me to tell the Production to look inside itself for all the correct source clips? Or, what's the proper way to turn a project into a Production?

[KazuTa]

I found Edit/Reassociate Source Clips, which is working beautifully with my footage and sound. I am selecting all my dailies sequences for a particular year, then Reassociating footage & sound to the appropriate projects.

How do I Reassociate Source Clips for archival, music, sound effects, GFX? Those are used randomly in random sequences.

[KazuTa]

It seems Source Clips got Reassociated for the dailies sequences I selected; but the source clips are not reassociated in any of the hundreds of the  edit sequences in this Production. Someone please help! Drowning here.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi @KazuTa,

Dividing up a huge single project into the bite sized projects making up the production is rather a big task when it comes to organizing assets. I have projects for SFX. I have projects for still graphics. I have projects for music, and so on. I move the assets from the original project and continue to re-associate all source material bit by bit. Now, I have an enormously complicated Production that has about 25 individual projects making it up. I've sustained it for years now. It houses projects from over ten trips abroad, hundreds of clips and audio stems, and thousands of photos. I am not sure if this advice helped you, but I just wanted to let you know that if you're feeling overwhelmed, just eat the elephant one bite at a time. If you have an assistant or intern, this would be good experience for them. Your next Production will be much better knowing the implications ahead of time. Come back for any advice.

Take Care,
Kevin

[KazuTa]

Dividing up the project was quite fun. The only problem is that there's no way I can Reassociate Source Clips to each footage, sound, music, SFX, GFX, and archival project for each of the hundreds of sequences in the Production. That would be thousands of steps.

I'm attempting to leave a giant "ASSETS" project and just divide up the sequence projects. The sequence projects seem to be the slow ones.

Is there a way I can break up the "assets" (into FTG, SND, MX, SFX, GFX, ARC) and maintain the Source Clip associations? That's the main thing I need, is for "Reveal in Project/Production" to continue to work.

[Kevin-Monahan]

I'm pretty sure you can. What have you tried so far. Have you made projects for each of these items yet? Any way you look at it, it's going to be an effort. Sorry about that.

Cheers,
Kevin

[KazuTa]

It's actually pretty fun. The problem is that, when I made "asset projects" for each kind of asset (FTG, SND, MX, SFX, GFX, ARC), the source clips in my sequences wouldn't "Reveal in Project" back to those projects. It looks like I can select all the sequences in a project and "Edit/Reassociate Source Clips", but I'd have to do so for every asset project (2020_FTG, 2021_FTG, etc., a total of 24 different asset projects); basically, 24 times per sequence project (of which there were 16; so, 384 times).

[Kevin-Monahan]

Yes, I'm afraid that's what you're tasked with. I used Match Frame > Reveal in Project from each clip in each sequence and fixed each one. That's why I suggested an assistant can help you with this. It may be likely that doing so is untenable for this project. Like, more work than it's worth. Sorry about that.

Thanks,

Kevin

[mattchristensen · Accepted solution]

@KazuTa the key is to keep all the projects open as you do this initial breaking apart. Yes you'll end up with a lot of projects open, and you should do File > Save All often! If you don't keep all the projects open, they won't "see" the clips move and therefore you'll have the experience you describe of clips in a sequence not knowing that their source clips have moved. Also, you should be dragging the items from project to project, do not copy/paste.

See p. 73 of the Best Practices Guide (Working with Productions > Migrating an Existing Project to a Production > If your work is a single project file): https://adobe.ly/PremiereProGuide – click "Get File" on that link to download the PDF.

The whole chapter "Working with Productions" is an in-depth documentation of how the feature works.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Excellent @mattchristensen! Thank you.

[KazuTa]

@mattchristensen Thank you for your illuminating reply.

In the Best Practices PDF, I think the part about LEAVING ALL PROJECTS OPEN when migrating should be in bold/blue. If one fails to do that, it could be a big problem during turnover since "Reveal in Project" won't work":

I think a lot of us are trying to migrate stand-alone projects to Productions; it'd be helpful if there was a video about it or something. I think people would really appreciate that.

[mattchristensen]

@KazuTa A good point; I'll pass it along to our documentation teaml. We have a whole series of videos about Productions from Karl Soule – here's one on migrating from a standalone project to a Production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upxpGcuM-Xc

[KazuTa]

Thanks @mattchristensen. I did watch this video along with Karl's other nine videos; but I missed the crucial step, at 07:52, of leaving all the projects open as I migrate the project into a Production so that all the links are maintained.

[Alain D.]

Hi @KazuTa ,

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but this guide from Jarle Leirpoll is what I read before diving into my first Production workflow. He does raise a few known caveats and a few do's and don't's.

--Alain

[KazuTa]

@Alain D. Thanks for this. Reading it let me know that multicam sequences will not move to another project when I move a sequence with multicam sequences in it into another project. Unfortunately, the editors where I work use lots of Nested Sequences:

Productions and nested sequences

Moving a sequence that contains a nested sequence to another project in the Production will copy the nested sequence to the new project. Yes, nested sequences will be copied, not moved, when you move a sequence containing a nested sequence.

This can possibly create a mess—unless you actually want a copy—so beware. It’s probably safest to delete the old instance after the copy has been made. Or just avoid moving nested sequences around too much.

[Unfortunately, our Nested Sequences are more than likely reused in multiple sequences throughout our old project, so this likely isn't a possibility for me.] 

If you only use nesting inside one project, you’ll have no problems. It’s when you start moving them you create chaos.

As Matt Christensen, who was on the team that developed Productions, explains it “This is intentional, and prevents Inception-like circles of nesting being formed and needing to be updated and conflicts resolved.”

A little hack from Paul Murphy is to change the nested sequence into a multicam ([select the sequence in the Project panel, "Open in Source Monitor", then] right-click [in the Source Monitor] and choose [Multi-camera / Enable]. This ensures that changes made to it will update across projects. It’s not recommended by Adobe, so use this method at your own risk.

[Alain D.]

@KazuTa , my pleasure. But the duplication problem is with nests, NOT multicams, right?

FYI, I used multicams in 3 different productions so far and they work great, but perhaps I am misunderstanding your need. Here's how I do it:
- 1x Project, "Multicam" where the interviews and multicams live

- 1x Project, "Edit" where the edit lives

- 1x Project, "Archive" where I copy the previous edit version to, so that my "Edit" project only has my main edit/sequence.

When I initiate my first edit in my Edit project, I use the "Multicam" project as the source "bin" if you prefer, to build my edit. From that point onwards, if I match any given multicam frame in my sequence, the associated multicam will pop in the Source Viewer; and if I match that again, it will open the "Multicam" project (if not already open) and show me where it resides in the project (or "bin"). 

There are no duplicates, no copies that get created this way. Even after copying the sequence to the "Archive" project before bumping up by +1 my version number on the edit to be updated.

With nests though, that's another story. Duplicates of the said nest will appear as explained by Jarle in the section you brought up. So, taking my previous example again, say there's "Nest_1" in my edit, and I copy that edit in my "Archive" project, 2 items will appear as I paste the sequence: the sequence itself, and "Nest_1". After a few iterations of this, as Jarle said, "it gets messy".

HTH --Alain

[KazuTa]

Yeah, my problem is with Nested Sequences (which my editors use A LOT), not with Multicams (which seem to work nicely, like Source Clips, in Productions). I have a bloated standalone project (it takes 1.5 minutes to Auto Save) that we tried to migrate to a Production, but all the Nested Sequences within the hundreds of sequences in the project made this untenable. We ended up leaving all the old sequences in the "source project" (the standalone project that we Added to the Production, then moved source clips out of), then made an empty "01 CURRENT EDIT" project that only has the editor's latest sequence (which auto saves super fast). 

[Alain D.]

Gotcha. Must be quite a mess indeed.

Yeah, the theory there is to break longer/more complex sequences into smaller ones, each in their little project but that would not solve the nesting problem.