Premiere Pro (& AE) Project File Preferred Location Save

[georgep21368903]

I would love to hear where people are saving their project files. For a number of years I always had my Premiere (and After Effects) project files and their auto-saves going to a folder on my Creative Cloud. This enabled me to always only have one version of the project that I knew was the latest and greatest that I could access from the office on my desktop system and/or on my MacBook Pro when I needed to WFH, or anywhere else. Then Creative Cloud decided to stop functioning in the traditional cloud way where it is constantly syncing files from devices to the cloud and back. Now I use iCloud in the same way. Before we started doing this there were always multiple versions of any given project floating around depending on what hard drive it was saved to and who the editor was. Plus, there was always the risk of losing the drive and therefore, the project file. With the cloud system I call up an old project and it tells me which drives it’s looking for to link to the media instead of me trying to remember which drive the project file was on, of course. Would love to hear if anyone else is doing something similar. Or give me a better plan. Thanks.

Geo

[R Neil Haugen]

Most file syncing services are really a mess to use with a single person using them for home/office/remote working. Adding more users just gets complicated.

Why? Because they use modifying bits in the file headers to track what they've synced, what's been changed and so needs syncing, and even deleting things. This can cause NLEs like Premiere to go "oh, this is not the identical file we expect to see ..." And that it the best problem.

The worst is that some users are getting entire project files deleted because the file syncing/cloud app they used was doing 'housecleaning' ... and often, they do not put things in the trash bin, they're just gone. Which is horrifying in the extreme.

There are workarounds such as setting up a synced folder and a separate Local use folder, and manually moving things over to the synced folder. It's a bit of a pain but works. I've seen people using a file backup utility that simply is set to copy files from their Local use folder to the syncing folder. That might work.

We ended up going to LucidLink, through Amazon S3 servers. Our partner Mo is in Cape Town, we're in Oregon. He's all Mac, we're all PC. Both he and we have down/up speeds at or above 400Mbps, and we simply use the virtual folder LucidLink sets up to work.

Both our computer and Premiere think that virtual folder is a real folder, but actually it's a link to the data in London. And it works just fine without needing to 'pin' files to local storage, which we could do if needed.

He's an Ae total bad-a$$ wizard, with some amazingly complex and stunning intros, transitions, and simply comps of things. All UHD or 'better' for size, our media is mostly 4k. With some things having 3-5 video tracks and 9-12 audio tracks for all the music, sound fx and such. It's really pretty stunning how well this works.

And we never have any Mac/PC issues either ... yea for that!

[georgep21368903]

Thanks for your thoughts, Neil. I have not experienced any of those problems related to the file header system other than in regards to dynamic link with After Effects. And that probably is not a result of the header file system you mention. That is really just a matter of sometimes needing to relink to the AE project file, especially when I've taken a project from the desktop to my MacBook Pro (Yes, I'm saving my AE project files on iCloud, too.). Deleting files would obviously be a nightmare scenario when it comes to a project file. There'd still be the autosave, hopefully. So, some earlier version of the project. Thank goodness, I have not experienced that. However, I am the only editor here using this system. It's only three of us and the other two are locked in there ways. But they're the owners and they can do what they want. ;0) I did explore LucidLink. That might be worth the basic $75 monthly fee if I could get everybody on board. But, it's great to hear what your system is. I'd love to hear from others. It's seems so fundamentally important. I'm guessing there are many varied plans or lack of plans that make up other editors' workflows. It seems to me that Adobe or Frame.io would have come up with a solid cloud based system and use it as a key marketing point.

Cheers!

Geo

[R Neil Haugen]

Everybody does everything differently, and that is an unending joy for me at things like NAB. I simply love the aisle-way discussions on how to do X. As whether it's editors, colorists, fx, or audio, everyone in the discussion does the same thing differently.

I know of users posting here and elsewhere that their process among their group of users is to use some specific file sharing or cloud based service, but carefully set up to do specific things. Many of the colorists I work with have elaborate processes that different clients use for their projects. So the colorist works with X client, who uses Y service in Z fashion, and also works with P client, who uses B service in T fashion.

I'd been hoping others would kick in here with comments, as this is always a moving target, it is always changing, and keeping up with those changes in app/sevice capabilities and options seem kind of important.

@Warren Heaton @PaulMurphy @Richard M Knight or anyone else, comments?

[PaulMurphy]

I second @R Neil Haugen 's suggestion of LucidLink - whether you're collaborating with others or working solo but you need to jump between different machines, it's great to know you're always accessing the same virtual drive wherever. For most of my large projects, I upload the project file and small proxies of my media to LucidLink.

I'll only use cloud services (like Dropbox) if I can store my media there as well, so this is usually for smaller projects.