Premiere Connecting to the Wrong Media after using Replace Footage

[DarrenManden]

Hey there,

We are running into a really frustrating bug.

The basic problem is this: When working in one OS, if you replace an asset, save the project, and open the same project in another OS, the "replace footage" command will have been forgotten, and you will have reverted back to the old asset. Pretty scary if you're working in a team, and all of a sudden the next person dealing with the edit is inadvertently working with incorrect media.

I've posted this to UserVoice here:

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/38734459-premiere-connectin...

A bit more detail on the issue:

In our office environment, we edit off of a server, and have done so for a long time now, without issue.

All systems used to be Macs, but we've started introducing some PC systems into the mix, and now we're starting to run into complications.

This is one of the more gnarly complications. To recreate the bug, we just follow this simple procedure:

1) Create a project in OS A (could be Mac or Windows), and then edit something.
2) Replace an asset in the timeline.
3) Save the project.
4) Open the same project in OS B (the opposite of whichever you chose in Step 1).
5) Marvel as your clip (replaced in Step 2) is linked to the old media.

Please note that the file name for the new media is completely different to the original, and often the codec is different as well.

A typical edit sees us using watermarked music in the early stages, and then once the client has approved the music, we will license the track, and replace the watermarked asset. So, it's not uncommon for the file names to change like this:

"demo_music.mp3" changes to "final_music.wav".

This only seems to happen with media that has undergone the "Replace Footage" treatment, and this never used to happen when we were only using the single OS.

Update (19/10/10):

One thing which I haven't previously mentioned is that this wasn't happening before the most recent update.

We've tried testing with Shared Projects as we were advised that this could help, but we had no luck, and ran into the same issues.

We also tried brute forcing our way around the issue, but unfortunately failed again. I'll explain, using the music example again.

When replacing demo music, instead of putting the licensed file into the same folder as the demo track, create a new folder, and put the licensed track in there. Within Premiere, use the replace footage command to link to the licensed track in the new folder. This should make Premiere look for 1) a new filename, and 2) a new folder.

No luck, unfortunately.

System Information:

All systems are running the latest Premiere release (13.1.5)

PC:
Windows 10 (1903)
Intel i9-9900X
64 GB RAM
Nvidia RTX 2070 (431.36)

Mac:
OS 10.14.6
iMac Retina 5k, 27-inch, late 2014
4 GHz i7
32 GB RAM
AMD Radeon R9 4GB

If you need any further information, please don't hesitate to ask. I'm happy to provide whatever might be needed. This is definitely something that is concerning us.

Cheers,

Darren

[DarrenManden]

Hey Neil,

Thanks for linking that, but as I said, we have tried Shared Projects, and we ran into the exact same issues.

Again, this worked back on 13.0, but doesn't work anymore. I'm happy to provide more information if you need it, and to try alternatives.

I actually tried reverting back to older versions today, but unfortunately we're nice and locked into the current version. 😞

Thanks,

Darren

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Darren, Hi Neil, Hi Community.

I'm almost certain that this is a filepath issue. Your two machines have a completely different file structure, so media linking is sure to be an issue. I'll ask the dev team, but that's the area I would look at. In all the shared project environments I've ever managed over the years, all the clients were either Mac or PC but not both.

Edit: From my contact at Reddit, it is a filepath issue, indeed. You need a plug-in to work on the system's media drives you use the least: MacDrive, etc. Info here.

My advice: standardize your computing environment or deal with this headache going forward. Go either Mac OR PC. Don't try and run both if at all possible. I'd sell either the PC or the Mac and go with what works.

Regards,
Kevin

[davidt13450554]

Hi Kevin,

I wanted to see if there is any update on the bug above, as I'm having the same issue, but on two Mac systems. 

What seems to happen is this:

SystemA (a MacPro connected to a QNAP shared storage system) imports a NTSC archive footage file into a project (called, say, "archivefilm_NTSC.mov"), and sends premiere project file and media to SystemB, operating remotely on a iMac.

On SystemB, a Pal version of the archive file is obtained, with a different file name (say "archivefilm_PAL.mov"). In the premiere project, the clip is unlinked and relinked to the Pal file. The project shows the correct frame rate (25fps) and filename ("archivefilm_PAL.mov"). 

The project and Pal media is sent back to SystemA. But when the project file is opened, it automatically reconnects to the original NTSC file ("archivefilm_NTSC.mov").

This happens even after cache is deleted on both systems.

Is there a fix for this, as it seems a very serious bug. Connecting (without any warning) to a file with the wrong filename and a different framerate could cause a lot of issues. Is this bug being addressed?

Many thanks,

David

[DarrenManden]

Hi all,

So, we managed to find a workaround, and that is to drop back to 13.1.3. On this version, everything seems to be working as expected.

@Kevin - Yes, I agree that it will have something to do with the different structures between Mac and PC, and I'm more than happy to try any suggestions that you might have - we've kind of exhausted our imaginations on what we can try (we've already tried deleting Media Cache, using Shared Projects, placing files into completely new folders), so suggestions are welcome.

I do need to repeat that things have been playing well up until the latest version, and the only seemingly viable workaround has been to just not use the current version and drop down.

As always, I'm more than happy to provide any additional info that the dev team may require, so please don't hesitate to contact me here on the forum, or by Private Message, or on UserVoice, or by carrier pigeon. Preferably not smoke signals though. They tend to get a bit lost in the haze over here.

Cheers,

Darren

[Kevin-Monahan]

Darren,

I am glad that you were able to solve issues by falling back to an earlier version. The advice I gave you about using plug-ins so that your WIN boxes to read your Mac shares and vice versa may be what is holding you back from complete integration. I put in an ask from engineering as to any secret sauce that needs to be considered.

Please also file a bug and I'll see if you can work without said plug-ins.

Thank You,
Kevin

[DarrenManden]

Hi Kevin,

"I put in an ask from engineering as to any secret sauce that needs to be considered."

This was working just fine until the latest version, so I'm not sure why we would suddenly need to start adding plugins, or changing systems. The temporary fix is to drop back to 13.1.3, so surely something has gone awry since then if it is working as expected there, and worked just fine before then as well.

Regarding bugs: I'd filed a bug before creating this post, and have had a link to that bug in the main part of this post since then. UserVoice is the only place for filing bugs, correct, or is there somewhere else?

Just to clarify:

We are editing off of the NAS. The systems have been able to play together nicely before 13.1.5. Once that came out we started getting the weird reconnection issues.

Cheers,

Darren

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Darren,

Sorry I missed your link there. It's been a busy day.

I made sure the team saw your post along with your bug in our internal chat client. No response yet. May take a little time getting an answer. Sorry.

Hope we can get you some answers soon as that will clear up how we support this workflow, as well.

Regards,
Kevin

[DarrenManden]

Hi Kevin,

No sweat. Again, please feel free to contact me directly for any further information.

This has never been a problem, so we're just really looking forward to it getting resolved. Anything that we can fire through to help, we're more than happy to.

Cheers,

Darren

[DarrenManden]

Hi there Kevin,

Any word on this yet? We've downgraded to 13.1.3, and things are working as expected, but it would be great to know if we could upgrade at some point.

Out of curiosity, we use After Effects across OS's on a frequent basis, and although I know that you're dealing with less footage in there, we never seem to have any problems at all with re-linking, etc. The worst we'll ever come across are plugins that might not be installed on all systems, or a font that needs to be synched/installed, but that's about it. The files just re-connect. Do you have any ideas on why that is?

Anyway, definitely looking forward to being able to upgrade Premiere again. As always, if any of the engineers need any further info, or if they'd like to hop onto a Bluejeans chat, I'm more than happy to.

Cheers,

Darren

[jay.m.slater]

Hi Guys, 

I was wondering if there has been any update on this yet? We have this bug and it is the most infuriating thing. One editor will make amends on their workstation (say replacing watermarked stock with purchased) and then this amends have to be re-done if opened on another OS. We are all working off the same server and same drives - they appear as the same file path name but Premiere decides to recevrt to the original file path. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

Cheers

Jay 

[DarrenManden]

Hey there Jay,

Our only consistent solution was a brute forced exercise in frustration. So, after we replace an asset, we do a bit of renaming of the original file.

Original file: Example01.mov

becomes: E_xample01.mov

Adding the underscore as the second character tends to break any of Premiere's resilience to the original file. We tested having it as the first character, but it just reconnected to the original media.

Premiere is definitely resilient at the worst of times.

Hopefully that helps.

Cheers,

Darren

[Jeff Bugbee]

Someone else mentioned file paths.. Is your pathing exactly the same on Mac as it is on PC?

For example: on a Mac, if you're connected to \Volumes\Server01\Videos\Movie.mov

And on a PC, you're connected to D:/Videos/Movie.mov

it's likely not going to reconnect properly. I'm not saying throwing a Replace Media command in there isn't buggy, or that swapping Operating Systems is not buggy, but is it possible to attempt to remove the file pathing issues from the equation?

Not much you can do on the Mac side, but at least on windows, you can skip using drive letter mapped drives by using Explorer to navigate directly to the share: Like the example above, you could use //192.168.50.100/Videos/Movie.mov (where 192.x is the IP of your mapped network drive)

Like others here, my team does not do any cross OS projects so we're all shooting in the dark here.

One more thing you could test is to create a self contained project, aka: place all your assets in a single folder, including your project file (say, on the Mac), do some Replace Media commands, Save,  then copy that entire folder over to a PC, and see if it opens correctly there. Doing this you are removing the networking/file path aspect from the equation and if this works, you're closer to narrowing down what exactly the issue is.

[MadsEhlers]

Just wanted to say that we are also running into this problem, and it is really frustrating. 
Any solutions - other than renaming old files? 
This is not a solution as it will require us to relink every single file that has been changed, every time we switch between OS.
Our next step is to change our windows machines to not use the drive letter. 

[MadsEhlers]

Changing our windows machines directly to the share didn't work either. 

[Jeff Bugbee]

Did you attempt any of the troubleshooting steps I detailed above?

[MadsEhlers]

Hi Jeff. 🙂

Not much you can do on the Mac side, but at least on windows, you can skip using drive letter mapped drives by using Explorer to navigate directly to the share: Like the example above, you could use //192.168.50.100/Videos/Movie.mov (where 192.x is the IP of your mapped network drive)

This did not resolve the issue. 

Furthermore I have tried to work directly on an external drive. 
1) I saved on OS-A.
2) Then opened the project on OS-B and replaced a piece of footage.
3) Then opened the project on OS-A again, where the media was now offline.

(which is a different error from when working on a server, where the footage was simply still the old footage.)

The Name of the clip was now the name of the new clip.

However the media file path was still of the old clip. 

[MadsEhlers]

Just tried to redo the above, but with clips with identical names, except for the ending "_v01" and "_v02".
This resulted in the original error of the name of the clip chaning, but when revealing the clip in explorer, the old clip is shown. 
No footage was shown as offline or missing. 

I think this excludes the network as the problem.

[MadsEhlers]

As of now the only solution we can think of is to rename every single clip that has been replaced on either OS, with the prefix "OLD_" in explorer/finder. 
This however will bring up the "Link media"-dialogue, and we will have to manually relocate every single clip, as the file name Premiere is looking for, is the old. (See screenshot)

Please bump this to the developers, as cross-platform work is effectively no longer an option. 

[goonch92]

I'm running into the same exact issue.

Cross platform/system project file sharing. On my PC though it seems to be connecting to other media with the same file name and then automatically creating a new directory for the "linked" media. 

Basically I have no clue on my end which clips are the correct/origonal ones.

I have a hunch i might be ablet o fix this by manually and individually relinking every file rather than having premiere do it automatically. that would take hours to do and isn't even gaurunteed to work. I'll try down grading to an old version first though. I'm working on 14.6.0

[goonch92]

Older versions didn't work. Now I'm gonna open on a different PC and see if that helps.

[goonch92]

The problem still persists. 

I'm desperate here. Anyone have a fix?

[jonkristinsson]

Hey, it's 2022 and we've just checked with the latest version of Premiere (22.3) and this is still an issue. Has anyone at Adobe had a look at this issue?

[R Neil Haugen]

Let's get @Bruce Bullis involved here ... as yea, that's a painful issue.

Neil

[jay.m.slater]

If Adobe actually cared about fixing this, then they would have done already. It's been flagged for 2 and a half years. 

[Bruce Bullis]

I think Neil may have too high an opinion of my expertise/influence. 🙂

I've asked PPro's Media team to comment.