Long Update Project Items Time

[thec18343912]

We're working a fairly significant sized project using Team Project. However, whenever one of the editors or assistants shares a change, it takes the other computers a very long time to update those changes (appox. 30-45mins), even if the changes were very minor (e.g. creating a bin). Is there something we're doing wrong, settings-wise?

Thanks.

[PeterELee]

When you say "it takes the other computers a very long time to update those changes," do you mean the time it takes for the "Get Latest Changes" button to light up, or the time they spend waiting in the progress dialog after actually getting the changes? If a bin is created, then the number of items in the bin will be a factor on that initial sync, especially if they reference many separate media files (as opposed to subclips from the same media file).

A few other questions - roughly how large is the Team Project? Are you using Premiere Pro, After Effects, or both in the Team Project? Are you using the latest Creative Cloud release (Premiere 13.0.2 and AE 16.0.1)?

If the project size is causing performance issues, I'd recommend splitting it up into multiple, smaller Team Projects. In Premiere, you can have multiple Team Projects open at once, so it's fairly easy to copy and paste between them. Premiere also allows you to organize a collection of smaller Team Projects by linking them. See Create a Team Project  for more details. AE does not yet support multiple open projects or linked Team Projects, but you can still import assets from other Team Projects via the Media Browser.

[thec18343912]

Thanks Peter!

To answer your first questions, we're spending a long time waiting for the progress dialog after getting the changes.

The project has roughly 17k files, and about 11tbs. We're using Premiere Pro 12.1.2 and No After Effects.

Thanks again.

[PeterELee]

Thanks for the info. I can't remember whether or not linked Team Projects were supported in 12.1.2. I think they were, but I'm not 100% sure. There are a number of stability and performance improvements for Team Projects in Premiere 13.0.2. While I understand that it can be risky to upgrade in the middle of such a large project, I would strongly suggest having an editor experiment with 13.0.2 when you have a chance, perhaps with a smaller Team Project or a copy of this one.

[thec18343912]

A possible work around, as I understand, is to create a small team project through "Linked..." then transfer specific footage from the parent project to the new smaller project. The changes done in the smaller will have to be shared with the parent project. Is this correct?

Thanks again, Peter.

[PeterELee]

Basically, yes. I find it easiest to think about linked Team Projects like aliases or shortcuts. If you split a project into multiple, smaller pieces, links help you organize and find those pieces. For example, if you normally organize your footage in bins, you could create a separate Team Project for each logical grouping that you would normally put in a bin (by day of shoot, camera, interview subject, what have you), In your master Team Project, you would create links to each of these footage projects. Now, when you're ready to create a segment of your program, you can create a new Team Project for that segment, dragging in the footage that you need for that segment from the "bin" projects.

There are no hard and fast restrictions on the size of Team Projects, but opening and auto-saving is generally much faster in smaller Team Projects, with, say 2,000 or fewer assets. The biggest factor for auto-saving and getting latest changes is the number of new or updated items since the last save or sync, especially media files.

[thec18343912]

Great! That sounds like it could work for our project, but I have a couple questions/concerns about what adapting this new workflow might entail for us as we get closer to delivering. At the moment, our "Master" Project contains every asset for the project (17k+ assets), and every time we share changes between the editors, it takes a long time to upload. I understand that creating smaller "Linked" project for specific segments will drastically reduce uploading times. My question(s) is, as the Master project is broken down into smaller Linked Projects, what is the best way to consolidate the work that was done in separate Linked projects back into one project. Do we create another Linked Project (importing the work done from the various Linked Projects) or update the Master Project? (I hope this is understandable).

Thanks again, Peter.

[PeterELee]

You have a couple of options for bringing everything together. The first steps, either way would be something like:

1. Create a Master Team Project that contains no media, only links to your other Team Projects.

2. When you create a new Team Project that holds footage, add a link to that in the Master. "File/New Linked Team Project..." lets you either select an existing Team Project to link to, or create one and link to it at the same time.

3. When you create a segment, create a new linked Team Project for that segment and import whatever footage you need for the segment into the segment's Team Project. It will ultimately contain a small number of sequences, plus the footage they reference.

4. When you're done creating segments, your Master Team Project will contain links to all of them, and to the footage "bins."

Now you have a couple of choices to assemble everything:

5a. Render each segment individually, then import and assemble the rendered segments in the Master Team Project (or a new sub-master Team Project).

or

5b. Create a sub-master Team Project and import the sequences from each segment into the sub-master. You can import sequences by dragging and dropping between Team Project windows, or using copy and paste. Importing a sequence will also import any footage or sub-sequences it uses. Assemble and render using the imported sequences and footage.

or

5c. Skip the sub-master and just import the sequences into the Master Team Project.

Does that make sense?

Ultimately, if you only anticipate using a few thousand pieces of footage in the final product, you could just divide the raw footage / selects into a few Team Projects, plus one additional Team Project to hold all of the segments plus the footage that's actually being used. That way you won't have to worry about keeping a second copy of each sequence in sync between two Team Projects.

[37squared]

Hi Peter -

The Linked Projects function works beautifully to maneuver around the long sync issues. So that deals with one issue.

My question is this:

When we create a Linked Project, and then drag a sequence from the Master Team Project into that Linked Project, Premiere re-creates all of the associated assets of that sequence in the Linked Project. We can work away on that sequence alone in the Linked Project, with lightning fast sync times. So far so good.

But...

When we are done working on that sequence - if we want to migrate the new version of that sequence back to the Master Team Project (ie copy that back to the Master), it again re-creates associated assets in the Master - making several duplicates of assets that are already in the Master Team Project.

Is there a way around this? Specifically, can one migrate a sequence back to the Master without that re-creation of assets during that step?

[PeterELee · Accepted solution]

In theory, at least, when you copy a sequence from one Team Project to another, the only items that should be duplicated are the ones that are different between the two Team Projects. That's what I see in my simple tests, too. For example:

1. Team Project A contains a sequence and two clips, which are used in that sequence.
2. Team Project B is initially empty
3. When I paste or drag the sequence from A to B, the sequence and clips are duplicated in B.
4. If I then edit the copy of the sequence in the Team Project B and paste that back into Team Project A, the sequence is duplicated in A, but the clips are not, since they were not edited.
5. If I rename a clip or change other metadata in B, then a new copy of that clip will also be made when I paste the sequence, since the original copy of the sequence still refers to the old version of the clip, and we don't want pasting a new sequence to change the contents of an existing sequence.

When footage or nested sequences are duplicated due to edits, though, there aren't really many tools to manage the duplicates yet. I think that's an area we need to look to see how we can improve things. I'll file a Feature Request to see what we can do.

For now, I can think of a few workarounds for updating the Master Team Project, though none of them are ideal:

1. If there aren't too many segments, share the Master project so there's a named initial version, then delete everything but the links from the Main TP and re-import and reassemble the linked sequences. You can use the version history to get back to the original assembly as needed. Repeat as needed, sharing before each version.

2. Render the linked sequences and only import the rendered footage into the Master Project.

3. Store only bins at the top level of the Master Team Project, and quickly put any duplicate items into a new bin each time you update the master. This is because any duplicated footage or sequences are always put at the top level of the Team Project, so if you don't normally store footage or sequences at the top level, you can quickly spot the duplicates and move them to a better location. You can quickly separate the bins and links from the footage and sequences in the Team Project panel by enabling and sorting by the "Media Type" column in that panel.

Unfortunately, I can't think of a more elegant solution at this point, though I'd be happy to hear if anyone has a better procedure. As I'll said before, I'll make sure we're tracking this issue if we aren't already.