Best Practices for splitting a big project into two?

A

ajwwong

Member
So, I'm editing a feature film using Premiere... the project file is getting pretty big [like 25MB] and I'm trying to keep Premiere from crashing literally every 8 minutes. [I have autosave on for every five minutes.]

One of the things that I think would help is to split the project into two smaller ones--- maybe even three... And then reincorporating them later on. Is there a best practice on how to do this? Or is it just a pretty straightforward thing.

Thanks for your help.
 
You can edit each sequence in a separate projects and import all the projects into a master timeline at the end.
 
No you can't but if you export them you could take those clips and slap them together, you would be compressing twice unless you export uncompressed. You could always copy paste timelines from various projects, but thats super time consuming. If there is an easy way of doing things, I would also be interested in knowing.
 
@zergethe...

You can import one project into another as Huy Vu stated. Why did you say "No you cant"?

You also can use the intermediate type workflow as well. Exporting a clip and using that in a new project. You are correct. Do not Compress / Recompress or use a compressed encode for intermediates.

You could edit each reel as a separate project.
You could do sfx scenes in a separate project or separate timeline and use an intermediate.

You could use AEFX for part of your workflow.
 
I was editing a TV show a while back, and the project file grew to over 45MB's... needless to say, premiere was not very happy about it! I ended up breaking up all the scenes into different projects, and "slapping" them together... as was suggested earlier...

Just my 2c
 
whats "slapping"?

Never heard this technical term used in reference to editing workflows before. Sounds kind of rough.
 
a cople things you can do to save memory and have less isues with a big project is to not have the video thumbnails on the clips in the timeline. just turn them off, and also you can not show the waveform of he audio. if you clear your history when you save the project it helps as well. but yes ulitmatiley if you need to you should break it into seperate projects, and then pring them all back into a master project. if you stor all the projects in one place you can just select them all at once and import them and if you number them sequentially according to scene or act or whatever they will be in order when you drag them all to the timeline at once since they will be in numerical order in the project bin if you sort by name. ive been working on an 5.1 HD feature @ apx 2 hours length for a while now, and i get roughly 1/2 hour to an hour before i need to restart the app if previews are enabled. but restarting premiere will clear the locked RAM and let you run for a while again. Im still on CS3 though so i dont know if they fixed the memory allocation issues in CS4. basically the app just uses memory and doesnt want to let go of it so on huge projects you eventually use it all up and it gets sluggish and then gives you issues till it quits. but the above tips should help you out. you also may want to lower your auto save project version max. im not sure if it retains memory for each version when your working, but it could be compounding the issue if it does for any reason.. just a shot in the dark additional thought.
 
..BIG THING ! but i also forgot to mention that you should disable rendered previews if you havent already in the timeline panel. even if your not prerendering anything at all. it keep the program from hogging more ram using RAM previews and generally you can edit large projects without too many if any hangups if these are disabled. search the ppro help for "disable rendered previews" for info on how to do this. its simple, and you can re-enable them with a click of a button once your done editing your project to prerender things. YOU CAN PROBABLY DO THIS ALONE AND HAVE NO MORE MEMORY ISSUES IN YOUR HUGE PROJECTS. most editing cpus are fast enough to render things realtime without preview files needed now adays anyway. so its almost best o just leave it off until you need to prerender a segment if its giving you any issues during export rendering. plus it gets rid of that annoying red render line :) hope this helps.
 
Neil Rowe said:
a cople things you can do to save memory and have less isues with a big project is to not have the video thumbnails on the clips in the timeline. just turn them off, and also you can not show the waveform of he audio. if you clear your history when you save the project it helps as well. but yes ulitmatiley if you need to you should break it into seperate projects, and then pring them all back into a master project. if you stor all the projects in one place you can just select them all at once and import them and if you number them sequentially according to scene or act or whatever they will be in order when you drag them all to the timeline at once since they will be in numerical order in the project bin if you sort by name. ive been working on an 5.1 HD feature @ apx 2 hours length for a while now, and i get roughly 1/2 hour to an hour before i need to restart the app if previews are enabled. but restarting premiere will clear the locked RAM and let you run for a while again. Im still on CS3 though so i dont know if they fixed the memory allocation issues in CS4. basically the app just uses memory and doesnt want to let go of it so on huge projects you eventually use it all up and it gets sluggish and then gives you issues till it quits. but the above tips should help you out. you also may want to lower your auto save project version max. im not sure if it retains memory for each version when your working, but it could be compounding the issue if it does for any reason.. just a shot in the dark additional thought.
Click to expand...

Forgive me for being daft, but how do you turn off video thumbnails and audio waveform in the timeline. Thanks!

PS. I'm bumping up from 2.5GB Ram to 4GB Ram in a couple of days... so hopefully this will also help. [Just editing in SD, for me.]
 
just expand the tracks by clicking the arrow on the left at the head of the track, then click the little box looking thing in the track header on the left and you can select how clip thumbnails are shown (head only, head + tail, tail, or none) and you can show or not show the waveform if you click the box in the head of the audio tracks after expanding the track. if you have any trouble just search the help for (show waveform in timeline, and show clip thumbnails) it should pull it up. :) did the removing previews help? ive found that for some reason it works well for me but if the app does ever say memory is low, i can load a long clip into the scource monitor from the project bin, and i scrub back and forth acrossed the clip a couple times and then the app seems to have cleared the memory to run the timeline fine again. ..anyway worth a shot for you as well if nothing else helps.
 
Thanks so much for this. I swear, I did a search before and couldn't find it... but now, in case anyone else needs it here's the link for how to turn off thumbnails and audio waveform: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/PremierePro/4.0/WSD0AEED0B-69B7-4578-B33E-CC44690E8CC1a.html

And AMAZINGLY, the turn off video preview appears to be working magic! I am able to get probably 30 minutes out now without a crash, whereas before I was lucky to get 8 minutes.

I might not even need to break up the project -- fingers crossed -- which would be amazing.

Thanks so much for your help.
 
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