Premiere Productions with two remote editors

[Oli Mason]

Hello, I'm about to start setting up a Production project for a feature length documentary.

There will be two remote editors. If each of us has a local external offline hard drive (each drive perfectly mirroring each other), and we use an online storage (such as LucidLink) for the Premiere Productions file - should the Productions file link seamlessly to each of our offline drives?

Or is there a different, better workflow?

[John V Knowles · Accepted solution]

Yes, a Production can link to different media drives. Any Premiere project can remember up to 5 different media locations for clips so you won't affect each other's work by linking to different hard drives. You may go through an initial relink period on each project you open (especially if you are on different OS platforms) but after that it should be smooth.

A few tips:

• As you add media like music and GFX it can be hard to stay organized. Make sure you either add these things to LucidLink or else get a utility that will keep both drives in sync with each other. There's been many times I've opened a shared Project file to find media offline because it's located at "otheruser/desktop"
• Same with proxies. If you decide to make these then figure out if you want them in the cloud or mirrored to each drive. 
• It helps to have both drives labeled with the same name. So like "Doc Edit Drive" and not "Doc Edit Drive 1", "Doc Edit Drive 2"
• Set the Scratch Disks for the Production to LucidLink, not local. This location is shared between all users. Media Cache is local and not shared.

Happy editing!

[Oli Mason]

Thank you John, that's really helpful.

[R Neil Haugen]

I was hoping to run into John at NAB, but we didn't connect. Might have seen him in the distance once ... 😉

His comments are quite good, and I know many do work like this in LucidLink processes.

My partner and I were real early adopters of LucidLink, and have also a ton of experience with it. He's in Cape Town, SA ... I'm in Oregon, USA, and our filespace is on Amazon S3 servers in London.

We found that we could work with everything but the local cache on the S3 servers, seen by our systems on the virtual drive LucidLink sets up. To the poiint that he could call me from Cape Town, that he was loading a folder inro our filespace. He's all Mac, bit time, note!

I'd go right to the Windows file manager, and yep, I could see the frst filenames showing up in the virtual drive, and I'd go right to Premiere and start importing them.

They hadn't even finished uploading from Cape Town to London, and in Oregon, I'm importing them into a Premiere project and dropping them on a sequence!

Weird but true. So weird we'd actually ... well, giggle is probably the best term ... about it.

So in my experience, everything from mid-K 4/6k original media, Ae exports in 6k, all played without issue on a Premiere timeline with all the media living in London.

If you need you can 'pin' a file in the virtual drive, and L-L then downloads it to local storage, but it is still accessed via the virtual drive by everything as if still online.

So ... your choice, as always. Best wishes of course!

[John V Knowles]

Sorry I missed you at NAB, @R Neil Haugen !

[andrea_stewart]

I also have a remote editor and am debating having two separate pprojs per editor, sharing media that is on Lucid Link or if we should use Productions. If we use productions, it seems like instead of having the media in the project window bins, you have it actual projects. That seems awfully confusing. Wouldn't you need to have a bunch of projects open at once to have access say to Music, Dailies, Gfx, VO, etc? Am I missing something? Attached is what I was hoping to set up, but instead it seems each of these folders needs to be a project? In the past we have shared media on Lucid Link and had separate projects, but the consolidating got messy at the end.

[R Neil Haugen]

That organization looks pretty solid, pretty standard.

You use folder trees to organize you separate parts .... media, rushes, general sequences ....

You use projects to 'house' the bits of those: media holding projects in the media folder tree, sequences in the sequence folder tree ... 

It's a good practice to setup your media/assets on-disc storage in a folder tree mimicing the one in the Production. Then import the assets into their appropriate project.

As an early adopter of LucidLink, in Oregon, with a partner in Cape Town SA, our Production and our media "live" on Amazon S3 servers in London. We've been totally pleased, never had an issue in several years. And note, he's all Mac, we're all Pc. Again, never an issue whatsoever.

Our computers "see" everything on the LucidLink virtual drive as if it was totally a local drive. We both have solid speeds above 300Mbps, and low latency, and never had a problem with playback or anything.

But if a file was too large ... I dunno what that would be even. Maybe a 12K video clip of some length? We could just "pin" the file within LucidLink which downloads it to local storage, but uses through the virtual drive like everything else ... and it would function fine and our computers would never know the difference.

Why would having mulitple projects open be more confusing than mulitple bins? Same thing, totally.

If you have more questions, feel free to ask.

[andrea_stewart]

Thanks for the response Neil. So if I understand it right, instead of having the media in the folders, I will have projects in the folders in my Project Window. And then In each of those projects I will import the appropriate media. So where you see my clips in the Dailies bin, instead I would have a project called Dailies in the Dailies bin and when that project is opened the editor would find the media. Correct? Will that result in a bunch of tabs at the the top of the Project window? I suppose it's sort of like bins in avid, and they could be undocked from there and moved whereever the editor wants?

[R Neil Haugen]

Yep exactly that. And yep, you can eithe have them as tabs or in another panel/panel group.

I have my Productions folder and all project tabs on my left-side 1920/1080 monitor in a panel group, main UI/timeline/ECP in the ultrawide 'middle' monitor, and my UHD is above that as transmit out/clean feed monitor.

I don't know if you've seen these, but the best documentation Adobe's produced on using Premiere is this group on Productions ... probably as user Jarle Leirpoll was the lead writer.

Premiere Pro Productions Introduction

Using Productions in Premiere Pro

Adobe Long-form and Episodic Best Practices Guide 

Jarle’s blog expansion of the pdf Multicam section: Premiere Pro Multicam

[Oli Mason]

Hi Andrea, just to add on what's already been helpfully responded.

You won't need to have each project open for each daily / media when they're in use in a more complex sequence.

Let's say you're cutting your rough cut, using media from multiple bins. You can just have the rough cut sequence tab open - it will automatically pull the media it needs from the other media projects. I hope that helps.