Renaming original media files for archivability, any way to easily keep them online in Premiere?

[tjmeanea]

I have a number of Premiere Projects that have media named in a way our archivists on Windows apparently can't accept, so I need to use name mangler to take out things like "&" and "?" out of filenames. Why they were originally named uses those characters is beyond me, but I've been trying to investigate ways to be able to rename these files in Name Mangler to remove problematic characters but still have Premiere recognize the files themselves. Otherwise I have to spend about 2 hours on each project manually re-linking. 

I have investigated using clip IDs and XMP IDs but nothing I've run across seems like it is going to be able to help me. 

Any thoughts?

[Warren Heaton]

You may already be taking this approach, but the quickest way that I can think of (that still requires some patience) is to duplicate the source footage that needs to be renamed in the Finder and then rename the copy.  Leave that Finder Window open and back in Premiere Pro use Clip > Replace Footage and then drag and drop the renamed duplicate into the dialog box to quickly choose it.  To speed things up a little bit, we can set a custom keyboard shortcut for Replace Clip.  Then delete the original file with the special characters in the file name.  You don't have to create a duplicate into the Finder first, but I find that it makes it a little easier to have files online for this process when it comes to verifying your work as you go.

Relinking media certainly works, but I prefer the ease of dragging and dropping from the Finder that can be done with Replace Clip.

[tjmeanea]

Thanks for the input. I hadn't considered that approach. I'll have to try it and see if it speeds things up!

[tjmeanea]

That nets me about the same speed as the manual re-link since the files are thankfully all in the same folder. If I could batch replace footage that would speed it up. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Warren Heaton]

There's a feature request for having options for "Rename File to Match Clip" and "Rename Clip to Match File" (mirroring a feature from Final Cut Pro classic).  Hopefully we'll see that at some point.

[Mathias Moehl]

I just wrote this automation for my (paid) extension Automation Blocks for you. It looks at the file paths of all files of the active project and if it finds any occurrences of & or ?, it renames the files and relinks the footage items to the new files.

You can simply duplicate and adjust the "in text ... replace" blocks to add more replacements in addition to "&" and "?". Or even get fancy by using regular expression replace patterns.

I have just tested this very quickly and it seems to work for me, but please test carefullly before applying in a larger scale.

I attached the block script to this message. You can download the XML file, then load it into Automation Blocks and execute it from there. You can also do that with the free trial version, which is fully functional for a few days.

I will add the tools also to our Community Library at

Project Management/Project Items/Rename Items/Sanitize Media File Names.xml