Transferring a Production to a new drive - best practices, or "Am I alone in this Adobe-built hell?"

[lehestro]

I'm cutting a feature and have a co-editor in another city. I realize Productions does not recommend using Dropbox to share a Production with another editor, but I was surprised by the ways in which it's managed to make editing hell. 

While all my media needs to stay local, I'm hoping moving my Production from Dropbox to LucidLink will cut down on the strange anomalies that keep happening (footage in Projects unlinking for no clear reason - projects no one is opening much less altering; my co-editor unable to view half of the projects in the Production for no clear reason, amongst many others). At the end of the day, even if my co-editor is not logged in, footage is always being unlinked in strange way. 

Haven't been able to find any best practices for moving a Production to a new location. Is it as simple as moving the Production folder to the new location? Will everything automatically link up if I open it there, if the source media has not moved? I don't want to create more problems than I got already. 

Also eager to hear from anyone that's cut a feature using Productions in collaboration with another editor. From my experience the whole thing feels like its in beta, even though it's been around for years. Nothing but misery, and I wonder if other people's experience is better or the same.

I've been an avid Premiere proponent (no pun intended) for over a decade, but this has been such a bad experience.

[R Neil Haugen · Accepted solution]

I would have recommended starting in a LucidLink filespace. I've used it for several years now, we were an early adopter. My partner Mo is in Cape Town, I'm in Oregon, our shared filespace lives on Amazon S3 servers in London.

It's been wondrous. We've left both the full Production and all media on the London servers. We both get better than 250Mpbs download data, and low latency, so we've been fine there.

Once you  have a LucidLink filespace setup, which creates a virtual drive on your computer, simply move the Production to that "drive" ... exactly as if you were moving it to another drive on your computer. You should both be able to use that within Premiere exactly as if it was on a physical local drive. With decent bandwidth, naturally.

You can also use the L-L filespace to move files if you need to. I recommend having identical file folder structures on all rigs if you're not parking your media in your filespace.

And the LucidLink slack channel is awesome for help, both the many L-L staffers that constantly communicate with users, and the other very experienced users. L-L is simply, by far, the best route for working collaborative video projects from afar. It was built to recognize how to move video files, and in the way that the apps that use them need them parsed out. Unlike Dropbox & the others that use a moving format more suited to documents and spreadsheets.

And check for Karl Soule on YouTube ... he's one of the top Adobe staffers in their "Hollywood" section, that services the needs of large productions whether episdodic or long-form. He's got some very good information on using Productions.

Also ... the best documentation about pro video use Adobe has is their Productions/Long-form information. Especially the long-form document. Which shouid be read by all editors of any use workflow for the amount of simply practical advice included.

And of course, check anything by Jarle ... including his website.

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

[lehestro]

Thanks Neil!. I haven't had a chance to do this yet, as I'm waiting for a some down time to make the jump, but I'll do it as you say. And thanks for the Karl Soule rec!

The best practices guide I've been referencing a lot, but there are still a lot of quirks that pop up, even when trying to follow it to the letter (esp with audio and productions-related issues – hopefully it gets worked out), so I'm grateful for the firsthand knowledge.

[lehestro]

So I finally was able to do this, and simply copied the Productions folder over to LucidLink. While I can open the production fine, the project files the production is referencing are still the ones on Dropbox, so it's not a true migration to simply drag the project over as mentioned above, but it does seem like a starting place. But all the subfolders/project files need to be relinked to Lucid, as they are still referencing Dropbox. 

The diagrams below explain it better than I can type it out. 

I went from this:

And now I'm at this:

but need to go to this, but am unsure how:

Basically need Dropbox out of the picture. Is there a way to do this? To essentially relink project files to the Lucid Folder the way one might relink media that moved to a new drive? 

[R Neil Haugen]

On our systems, L-L shows as a 'virtual' drive. It's the O drive on my desktop. If I want to move something to L-L, I just cut/paste or copy/paste to the folder setup I want in my LucidLInk filing system servers.

Nothing different than transferring files from drive to drive within my computer.

[lehestro]

What I had to do was delete the Productions folder from Dropbox to force it to look at Lucid for each project file. Things seem to be working fine now. 

So a two part solution – copying the Productions folder to the new location, and then deleting the old location. This seems to force Premiere to search in the new Productions folder for all of its project files. 

[R Neil Haugen]

Or select the clips in the bin, right-click "make offline".

Then select one of the now "lost" clips, and Locate. If the folder structure and and naming are the same, it will find all of the clips and reset the links.

[lehestro]

This would work normally, but I guess what made my situation a bit different is I wasn't moving my media to a new drive, just the Production/Project files. All the media remains on mirrored local drives (I have one, my co-editor has another). 

[R Neil Haugen]

If it wasn't finding the media, I would still have offlined/located.