STRUGGLING WITH TEAM PROJECTS

Report · Feb 14, 2022

Hey all. New to the group. Long time Premiere editor of documentaries. So I've got a serious dilemma with my new project. I'm co-editing a lots-of-footage documentary with another editor on the other side of the country. He and I have done this before on other films, but we encountered lots of 'bloating' of the project as we sent each other project files, made changes, sent them back to the other, etc. The project file (and bin systems, with duplicate files) grew and grew until the project itself was too unwieldy to handle. It got really slow, choked up, etc. You know the deal.

So...with this new project, we decided to try Team Projects in Premiere. It seemed like the perfect solution. We set it up and and cloned our hard drives and started early editing and things were going well until we hit the "auto-save" issue/error. Basically, you suddenly get an error saying "You haven't auto-saved in over 5 minutes." Well, long story short, auto-save is how the project gets saved in Team Projects, there's no Save function you hit manually. So ultimately once you get that error, there's no way to get out of it. You have to force quit. It was happening again and again and there's no solution on forums and talking to Adobe didn't help.

We were also having problems with Application Memory running out on our Macs, though we did everything imaginable to deal with the issue, on new Macs. It just didn't make sense.

So all in all, Team Projects has become a nightmare, and more of our day is spent rebooting, crashing, reading forums, crashing, rebooting, etc, etc... than it is spent actually editing.

So my co-editor suggested that we migrate the project to Avid, thinking that Avid has better storage/bin systems for two remote editors. I'm down with this plan, but the AE's we've talked to have said it's a really hard, long process, and if you've already done some editing, that it can be very hard to migrate edited sequences. So we're still exploring this, but i'm pessimistic.

So my questions are:

Has anyone used Team Projects and overcome the issues I mentioned above?
Has anyone successfully migrated an in-progress edit from Premiere to Avid?
Does anyone have any other suggestions of how two Premiere editors can daily share project files (using Resilio, Dropbox, etc) without getting the bloating of the project file?

Thanks everyone!!!

Eric

Report · Feb 15, 2022

Hi Eric,

My name is Udo, I'm a quality engineer on the Team Projects team - Sorry, for your troubles with Team Projects.
We have had customer who have overcome similar issues with Team Projects by breaking a large Team Project up into smaller ones. How many assets are in your project and how many sequences?
The more sequences in a project the longer it takes to scan all of them for possible changes, especially if the sequences contain a lot of data (e.g. due to effects, color, audio filter). The biggest performance win would probably be to move the older sequences out of the main Team Project into one or more separate ones, so only the sequences you’re actively working on need to be scanned.

-Udo

Udo Pawlik | Sr Software Product Quality Specialist | Adobe | upawlik@adobe.com

Report · Feb 23, 2022

Linked Team Projects can get a lot of things done for sure.

But there is another possibility, and that's using the Premiere Pro Productions model with fileserving services like LucidLink.

Productions mode gets around the entire project boat/lag issues, works fine for mulitple editors, but does take a few days to reconfigure your brains to working with the very different model that uses.

I have a partner in Cape Town that I do both Team and Productions work with. I've been setting up our joint projects recently using Team for projects with "lighter" media, and Productions with 'heavy' stuff.

The TP projects, the media is on our Amazon S3 server in London, and LucidLInk's fileserver process gives both of us a 'virtual' drive on our computers. He can add media from Cape Town, within moments it appears on the LucidLink virtual drive on my computer, and I can add it into Premiere while it's still uploading from Cape Town. Bizarre, but ... wow.

We've done things with short sequences using the TP process via LucidLink, but with larger files and longer sequences, it's not as slick.

However, for that I've been using LucidLink as our transfer processor, so we each have local matched storage of all files. The Production folder structure including all subfolders and project files lives on the LucidLink drive. So far, it's worked ok. And from what I've heard and seen on the LucidLink Slack channels, and via other Adobe staffers like Karl Soule and David Helsmly, that's being used as a standard method by quite a few companies.

Neil