Preferences Migrations on Upgrade: Observations, Critiques, and Information

[ah_photo]

I usually don’t upgrade to major builds so early, but I’ve been having downtime between projects at my home workstation so I figured “why not!?”, especially considering I can keep the previous build installed.

While I’m sure Premiere Pro 2020 is fine overall, I really have to air a grievance over the settings migration process. Even with “Import settings over” enabled with the installer, it didn’t go very smoothly and I wanted to share both with Adobe and other users who may encounter this.

Upon launching 2020, I noticed that my settings configuration had not properly moved over. Settings seemed a bit older, and then I realized what was going on. Pr 2020 migrated an outdated (and defunct) settings from the local settings directory. So I...

• Tried to sync from the cloud (thinking I could download my cloud settings to 2020). Nope. Since the cloud copies of the settings are also version isolated, it force uploaded my incorrect settings to the cloud instead.
• So, I cleared the 14.0 cloud settings directory, and manually copied the contents of Profile-CreativeCloud (for 13.0) into Profile-CreativeCloud (for 14.0). It worked and loaded fine! Success!? Not quite, I tried uploading to the cloud and it rejected the sync. I have to imagine something in those files attributed it to 13.0 and the server was maybe rejecting that.
• I cleared the 14.0 cloud settings again via Premiere and noticed the SynKitDB and Win (keyboard shortcuts) folders persisted after clearing. So I figured that at the very least the SynKitDB folder had some importance. I also cleared the 14.0 local directory settings this time too. I copied the contents (with the exception of SynKitDB and Win folders) of Profile-CreativeCloud (13.0) into my Profile-<User> (14.0) . Since the cloud settings were empty, Premiere assumed the local settings on boot and everything worked great. I then synced to the cloud and this worked without issue as Premiere created the CC settings on its own terms.

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For me, I got everything working so it’s nothing for me to fret over. However I think this highlights one glaring issue with Premiere’s settings and preferences management. For an ecosystem that often promotes the value of the “cloud”, Premiere Pro’s cloud settings are really poorly managed. If you utilize cloud settings, then when you upgrade to a new major build, settings migration is essentially worthless to you, and it even makes managing your settings at the local level quite confusing.

If I have any feedback for Adobe, it would be that the “migrate settings” function in the installer should seek out for the Profile-CreativeCloud directory, and if one exists, use that as the foundation for the next version’s Profile-<UserName> directory instead. It even begs the question: do we really need 2 local settings directories for each version? Could it just be one directory? Uploading to the cloud would move those files to the server as they are, and downloading from the cloud downloads the server files to that directory.

Also while not as big of a deal, Media Encoder isn’t any better. In fact it may be worse because it is still a 2-directory approach but it is inconsistent from Premiere. ME has a settings directory (13.0, 14.0, etc.) of which settings are stored inside. However one of those subfolders will be your email address which within itself contains ANOTHER full settings directory (the cloud version). Oy vey.

Anyways I hope this is of use to someone somewhere. Although maybe it was just me who had this issue though!

[Michael Grenadier]

nope.  always had serious hoops to jump thru when I upgrade.  What I would like is a way to manually export keyboard settings, workspaces, etc. and then have the option to do a manual import.  I know there's this trend (thank you apple, not) to bury more and more stuff under the hood but when the only way to migrate these settings is to figure out where the heck adobe is hiding them and than manually move them, you might as well enable this sort of export/import process.  At least I can figure out how to do this with the keyboard settings by simply doing an arbitrary save as that I can then search to find the file location, but with workspaces, ya gotta kind of just guess

[Michael Grenadier]

and I also support a number of clients with their premier workstations and I've often tried the synch settings game from a different account (mine).  rarely if ever works.  usually get the message "synch failed" without any explanation.  Is there anywhere to find an explanation in a log or whatever.  Gotta say I always overcome these problems, just always difficult.

[ah_photo]

I posted a primary response below, but to address your specific question regarding the sync failed, I experienced that too with my upgrade.

From my observation,  one of two things are happening:

1. The SynKitDB folder/files within cannot be copied over. If you are copying these over as part of your migration process, try not doing so. Something in their might be a key attributing to a specific Premiere version and CC account.
2. Or, settings cannot be copied directly from a Profile-CreativeCloud directory to another Profile-CreativeCloud director. Again I think this has something to do with some file in there acting as a key which associates with a version and CC account. Instead, try copying settings from your Profile-CreativeCloud directory and put it into their local Profile-<Username> directory. (clear out both of their directories before doing so). When that's done, Premiere should reference the local settings for them first since no CC settings exist. Then when your client selects to sync, it will be done naturally within Premiere and it should go through.

[ah_photo]

mgrenadier, I know what you mean. Thanks for sharing your experiences with this. Glad I'm not alone. 

The only reason why I was able to do this crazy workaround is because I had becoming admittedly a bit too comfortable with how Premiere stores preferences. When we switched to Premiere at work I was getting multiple workstations setup with the same configuration, and copying the contents of these folders was the solution.

However that has been contingent on me spending some time dedicated to learning Premiere's weird ruleset for managing this. Not everyone will or SHOULD have to dive that deep - and because of that you're right regarding the transparency of certain settings. Keyboard Shortcuts, Track Height Presets, Sequence Presets, etc. are all identifiable, but is again contingent on you knowing where to look. Workspaces are definitely the worst.

I'd really love to see something akin to Photoshop's Preset Manager, but have it pertain to any of Premiere's settings and presets. You can open it up, see what presets are loaded into your workstation on a per category basis, upload/download presets to CC, or export/import presets to your drive. On the backend, reduce it down to one directory of a folder of your settings and presets. Then replicate the same with Media Encoder. Premiere is a robust enough of software that I think it deserves the same level of attention to presets/settings that Photoshop gets.