Premiere team colla is horrible...

[Sherex]

Hi everyone, please don’t take this the wrong way…

I’m used to working on local projects and everything runs fine. But my channel is growing, so I had to hire an editor.
The problem is that my editing style is pretty specific, so I only want this person to help with the basic part: placing clips on the timeline. I handle the effects, polish, and final editing.

That’s the context.

I paid for Google Drive to sync the files, and at first it was more or less okay. But Premiere goes crazy when we try to work with the same project setup.
It crashes, freezes, and sometimes doesn’t even finish loading.

Any idea how to fix this or improve the workflow?

I read that Google Drive can create very long file paths/names, which might cause issues with Adobe apps. I’m not sure if that’s the real reason, but I’d love to know the most stable and optimized way to collaborate in Premiere without constant crashes.

Thanks a lot!

[R Neil Haugen]

Google Drive, Dropbox, WeTransfer, and OneDrive all do regular file-syncing passes through any folder they are connected to. They check for changes to know when a file needs syncing, and to track this they add bits to the file headers.

So there is a routine possibility of file access errors when Premiere is working and the file-sync app goes to town. Premiere may not be able to get immediate access to the specific things it needs ... and also, the constant changes in the file metadata make it difficult for Premiere to know that the file is the same file. Which is another constant problem.

So the troubles you are having are endemic to using any of those apps. That's just Life. 

The best way to use them is to keep local storage of all things that are outside the file sync app folders, and manually move things in/out yourself. It's a pain but doable.

LucidLInk, using an online-storage system and creating a virtual drive on each machine, is incredibly stable and workable. Neither Premiere nor my OS ever know the files are not on a local drive ... 

Our partner is in Cape Town, SA ... we're in a small town in Oregon. He is all Mac, we've never owned an Apple device ever.  

He calls via Whatsapp to tell me he's uploading files from Cape Town to our S3 servers in London. I go to my computer, open File Manager in Windows, the LucidLink drive that appears just like any 'real' local drive, and yep, the folder is already there. Within a minute, I'm seeing files appear in that 'drive'.

And as soon as they appear I can go into Premiere, and import them ... even drop them on a sequence. Start playback.

But note, the upload hasn't even finished yet from Cape Town to London! The LucidLink system is setup to move video files, in the type, size of packets, and order, that video apps need them. It's near Harry Potter magic, but it's amazing. If a file is 'large' enough, like say 8k, it struggles a bit ... you can 'pin' the file to local storage.

You do need really 250Mbps or better for 'live' work from the S3 servers. I have found it as rock-solid and useful as many around the world.