Running out of space - is Project Manager my saviour?

[oysterfeet]

I'm running out of space on my M.2 drive used for footage (separate from both scratch and OS disk) in the middle of my project. More footage is needed on the drive and work is to be continued on the project.

Plan is to buy a larger M.2 drive, copy project to temporary HDD, replace M.2 and the copy back from HDD to new M.2. 

Sounds easy enough and if Project Manager works as I think it does, then I should have no worries. I have little or no experience with the Project Manager of Premiere Pro, though.

This is an important project and can't afford to f^%& this one up.

Can anyone share some experiences, do's and don'ts please, to give me some confidence. 

[Nicolas from Autokroma · Accepted solution]

Hello,

You have several options here : 

• Copy your clips manually, copy your prproj, and then relink the media by hand. 
• Use the native Project Manager to "Collect & Copy" your project on your new drive. It can work, but there are sometimes some problems. So you can test this and check carefully your new project then after having disconnecting the first drive to be sure everything is here and not duplicated. Also note that all your media will be on the same root folder, nothing organised so .. 
•  Use the native Project Manager to "Transcode" your media. All your media will have the same codec, but there is a re-encoding process here, so you could loose some metadata, some codec advantages like BRAW, R3D, ProRes RAW, .. and the frames will not be "exactly" the same (so depending the codec etc .. you could see a quality difference). 
• Use the 3rd party paying plugin PlumePack to "Collect & Copy" : mainly if the Project Manager "Collect & Copy" does not work as expected or if you want your media organised from the Premiere Pro structure. 
• Use the 3rd party paying plugin PlumePack to "Trim without Re-encoding" : the trimmed files will keep their exact same quality (pixels are the same), metadata and same codecs. It just removes the unused frames (so it's like copying a part of the file). You could save up a lot of Disk Space here !

In any case, those options will not change the original project, so if you keep it on your first drive you will always be able to come back to it if you find that something went wrong. It's also always good to check the new Project generated ! 

For more info about the difference between Project Manager & PlumePack : : https://www.autokroma.com/blog/PlumePack-Premiere-Pro-Project-Manager-Difference

For more infos about PlumePack Limitations : https://www.autokroma.com/blog/PlumePack-Limitations-Known-Issues

Best,

Nicolas from Autokroma