When using a project manager, all files are placed in one folder.

I gave up on using Project Manager years ago. It has never worked for me at all; fails every time.

This is so dumb, especially as projects sometimes have clips with the same name so Premiere starts adding suffixes to the files. Often on reopen it gets them in the wrong order and breaks the timeline

It would be nice, for sure. For me, I'd like it to work properly at all since it functions about 20% of the time (not failing before completing).

I'm sure third party solutions will help solve this, but this should really be fixed by Adobe, IMHO.

Hello, 

About the AE comps, for FREE our third party plugin "PlumePack" also collects and relink AE comps + copy media dependency in the same subfolder (However you need to relink those media dependency of the AE comp in AE). Check my answer above to know more about PlumePack ! 🙂

Best,

Nicolas from Autokroma

Which is precisely why they call this the Project Mangler.

Fair point! With media core running in the background anyway Premiere should be fully capable of detecting and copying relevant assets for AE comps included in our Premiere sequences via dynamic link, but it doesn't do that at all. It's always a two-step process of first consolidating all AE projects, relinking the comps used inside Premiere to the new consolidated AE project and then and only then consolidating the Premiere project as a last step but even then we still get a mess with no subfolders which I would then restructure into subfolders after Project Manager copied everything and then I relink it all again with the re-created folder structure in place. It's kind of insane how much time we're wasting here.

The Project Manager is sometimes referred to as the Project Mangler, because it is in dire need of a revamp.

Besides the fact that everything gets dumped in a single folder, as you correctly pointed out, this function also works on a skin deep level. If you have ever used dynamic linking with Ae in a Pr project, you may discover that the Ae files do get copied over, but any asset that was used inside the Ae project file will not be. If you rely on the Project Manager for archival purposes, you may be in for a big surprise to find that several assets will be missing if you open it a while later when the source media has been long deleted from the editing workstation.

In the current version: only use with care, therefore.

Hello,

Indeed that can be annoying for big projects .. But you can try PlumePack ! It's a third party plugin for Premiere Pro for consolidating projects. There is a free mode for "Collect And Copy" which place the files following the Bins folder structure in Premiere Pro. With the Premium version, you can even follow the "Disk Media Folder Structure" with a smart algorithm. Premium also offers the "Trim without re-encoding" feature, to save disk space and keep the exact same quality, codecs, metadata, ...

More info on PlumePack in this article. 
Differences between the Project Manager and PlumePack in this article.

Best,

Nicolas from Autokroma

They did it with After Effect with "Dependencies" but not with Premiere pro. Everything is in the same place it's really boring 😕😕