Why does Premiere take so long to "read" a folder when relinking/locating media?

[boondock]

Mostly just curious as to what's going on in the background and why it takes so long to navigate to and then populate a folder in Premiere's "locate file" interface. It's especially apparent if a folder has several hundreds or even thousands of clips/media files. 

Opening the same folder in Windows Explorer or even Premiere's own Media Browser takes no time to populate all the files/folders within. So why does the locate media window get hung up on "Reading" a folder or drive? What is it reading?

[mitchn]

I'd like to know the answer to this question also! If I know where the file has been moved to, I can unselect "Use Media Bowser to locate files" and can navigate quickly to the file, but it does not search, so if I'm not sure where the file is, I have to wait forever while it is "reading" the folder.

[bobbih]

Yep, would like some answers to this one as well. I'm also experiencing a significant lag waiting for drives to become visible within Media Browser while trying to reconnect media.

But between the iMac suite and the PC suite, the performance difference is outrageous. Is it an indexing issue? Or simply just a difference in how Prem and Media Browser handle the task of connecting to drives on a PC?

If anyone has any insight, I would be eternally grateful!

[rikg8]

For me it hung up on "Reading" when I was trying to access my dropbox folder and dropbox was downloading / uploading files. When I paused the upload/download for Dropbox, Premiere was able to read the folder.

[R Neil Haugen]

First, having *any* Dropbox type services controlling the folders your media or other project assets are in can be problematic. Those services constantly check and modify things in the various files so they can track what needs say, another backup or something.

And both the changes to file headers and the time the service is accessing the files interfere with Premiere operations.

Also, Premiere project files are actually a huge text file. It’s all metadata references to file locations and of course more metadata for every sequence as of course sequences only exist as metadata about your choices.

So there's a massive amount of information that Premiere has to read, some is copied to project files, and metadata references and links to everything have to be established.