Premiere Pro Linking Back to Moved MTS Files - Please Advise!

C

Chris Lawes

Active member
Seriously what an unhelpful way to design this software. Am I missing something?

I have about 200 AVCHD Folders (with the full directory structure PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/0000.MTS, PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM/0001.MTS, etc..)

All the folders are all named according to date-time-cameraA/B/C-shot-etc. But I can't rename the MTS files because then they won't span properly (or even show up in Media Browser in Premiere for that matter!)

So basically I have tons of files called 0001.MTS, and the only way I tell them apart is by what folder they are in.

Recently we consolidated a bunch of AVCHD folders together onto one RAID array, but now all the Premiere Projects have "Offline Media." The program just says "Where is 0001.MTS?" It does not say what folder it USED TO BE IN!

Now I know that I can open up the .prproj file as .xml and edit with textedit like explained here (maybe that will help somebody.) But we didn't change only change the drive letter, we also changed what folder the folders are stored in "Drive E:/Consolidated AVCHD Folders/110415-0915hrs-Acam-CU-John" Instead of "Drive F:/Media Crew Files/AVCHD Imports/110415-0915hrs-Acam-CU-John" and various other hard drives that were brought together.
So I can't just find-and-replace the .xml file and fix my problem. If Premiere would just tell me the previous folder name I would be fine, but it doesn't have any way to do that that I'm aware of.

Also, if I show it the correct 0001.mts file in one folder, it assumes that all the other 0002.mts 0003.mts etc files that are offline are also from that folder!!! Even if they are completely different sizes and previously were stored in different folders. This is very frustrating as now we have all of our consolidated projects and their associated AVCHD folders disconnected with no way to connect them except manually. And manually would be very difficult and time consuming. How do you remember which 0002.mts file you had placed at 4:22 seconds on the timeline????


I would love to be corrected here and told that I am missing something and this is all user error (please don't tell me that moving my footage from one drive to another into a new folder counts as user error.) Any advice would be super appreciated.

I like Premiere in many ways, but I thought that the media management would be superior for FCP 7's (which also was terrible) but this is even worse!

Granted the fact that AVCHD Cameras record every file as the same name 0001, 0002, etc and don't work well with re-naming or changing the folder structure also plays in here. I thought AVCCAM was a "Professional" Codec, why can't it assign unique filenames like AVC-INTRA etc?



I'm totally fine with the image quality of AVCHD and the playback quality of Premiere, but managing the footage/files/names/metadata is a big headache!


-Chris


(Forgive me if this has a whiney tone to it, it's been one of those days..)
 
Well I think you found that moving source files around will completely mess up the project file. You'll have to rebuild a separate folder and ONLY put the files you are needing for the project in that folder, then open the project, and point to the first file when asked where it is and it should fill in the rest. Messing with XML and all that is unnecessary.

This is the only way to fix this...if I understand your dilemma completely.

As a side note...keep your project raw footage withing separate folders for each project in the future and you won't have this issues again. Never lump all your source files into the same directory.

Best of luck!
 
I transcode all my AVCHD to Avid DNxHD....single .mov file, no stupid directories/file structure, custom filenames, etc etc...you can get the codec from Avid's site and use adobe media encoder.

In my opinion, AVCHD was designed for 1 cam/1 shoot productions. The file naming/directory structure is terrible.
 
Phil1076 said:
I transcode all my AVCHD to Avid DNxHD....single .mov file, no stupid directories/file structure, custom filenames, etc etc...you can get the codec from Avid's site and use adobe media encoder.

In my opinion, AVCHD was designed for 1 cam/1 shoot productions. The file naming/directory structure is terrible.
Click to expand...

I'm going to do this on my next project. I don't have file naming issues because my workflow involves bulk renaming all files to reflect scene,shot,take using Bridge...or I should say my media manager does. If I don't have time then I'll just keep the files in their own directory. But yeah, would be great if one could name files in-camera.

The reason I'm going to do this is AVCHD is a b##ch to work with in premiere natively, once I add magic bullet and other effects to it. Man that DNxHD transcodes beautifully. Phil, do you notice a speed/efficiency increase by converting?
 
Richard Allen Crook said:
I'm going to do this on my next project. I don't have file naming issues because my workflow involves bulk renaming all files to reflect scene,shot,take using Bridge...or I should say my media manager does. If I don't have time then I'll just keep the files in their own directory. But yeah, would be great if one could name files in-camera.

The reason I'm going to do this is AVCHD is a b##ch to work with in premiere natively, once I add magic bullet and other effects to it. Man that DNxHD transcodes beautifully. Phil, do you notice a speed/efficiency increase by converting?
Click to expand...

Yes..DNxHD editing is extremely smooth....I have a fast computer with tons of RAM and even though Premiere handles AVCHD natively, it is a pain in the ass to edit natively..

An example of the workflow would be:

-you are doing a 3-cam shoot -- all AVCHD...each one of those cards will have the same file names (00000.MTS, 00001.MTS etc etc) and structure.....you can copy the contents of each card to its own sub-directory but, after 10 days of shooting and 30 different directories, what happens if you lose clip 00004.MTS and Premiere ask for its new location? How do you know which card its from? You don't...

Instead, transcode all cards to DNxHD and give them your own unique names (batch rename in Bridge if you want)...for example: "Day1-Card1-00000.mov" or "Day6-Card3-00065.mov"......much easier to organize your media now -- you know exactly what is what.
 
I guess I'm missing the importance of transcoding to DNxHD for the purpose of batch renaming. Couldn't one just batch rename the MTS files?
 
No NLE can keep track of your footage if you move it all -- that would be an impossible programming task, especially if you're "consolidating folders." As was noted above, you have to do it in judicious steps if you want to avoid a big mess like this one.

A further suggestion would be to have one big "shell folder." Put all of your footage folders in it. Put the .pproj file in it, too. Then, if you want to move the footage, move the shell folder with everything in it all at once. The project should have no problem still seeing the footage, because all of the footage is still in the same place it was in relation to the .pproj file.
 
Yup, that is what I do.
Project folder
-PP Prject Folder
-AE Project Folder
-AE Renders
-PSD Folder
- Source Clips (and subfolders)
-Scratch disk folder

Etc. ,then the project can be archived, moved, whatever and nothing goes offline.
 
If anyone gets to this page from having made the same boneheaded MTS mistake, I will point out there is one workaround I discovered if you have this MTS file-structure problem on a specific project. (theoretically you could do this with multiple projects by first re-organizing the files by time-stamp)


First, when premiere asks you to reconnect, don't do it then. Reconnect inside the project.


Let's assume you have a footage bin of offline files in the project that read


00000.MTS
00000.MTS
00001.MTS
00001.MTS



What premiere doesn't tell you is that it sorts by date after file name. Meaning that you can assume the first 00000.mts has the earliest time-stamp and the second 00000.mts the later one.


So to reconnect you would command or control-click only the first appearing file names (the first 00000, the first 00001, etc) until you have selected every other one or until the redundancy runs out.


Then right click and go to Link File and go to your batch of .mts files with the earliest time-stamp.


Voila, it should now link to the correct file. Repeat with the second (or third, fourth) set of MTS and it should also link up correctly.

The one good thing about being a boneheaded editor is that you get pretty good at fixing boneheaded mistakes.
 
I think this discussion is invaluable. We're working on several large projects right now.

In our case, we sort media/cards into named folders and then duplicate this naming structure within Premiere Pro's bins. There are several reasons for this. A) even if we transcoded we'd have to bin them anyway B) we go over every clip with a fine toothed comb and C) Their location in the bins relates to their location within the greater project structure.

Then, as mentioned above, if some clips need to be reconnected we reconnect them from within the project and it's then very clear which clips we are dealing with. With Premiere Pro you can select media an re-link batches but you're not required to re-link only all clips or just one... it's up to you. At first frustrating, but now appreciated.

While I agree that the AVCHD "reset to 0" naming scheme is a scourge that Panasonic can't get rid of quickly enough, I don't believe Premiere Pro can be faulted for struggling to deal with tons of files with the same filename. It's ridiculous that the cameras don't have continuous clip counting ability for physical filenames when the cameras have no trouble auto-incrementing the metadata clip names; but then I've already written to Panasonic techs about this issue at great length and the argument doesn't belong here, frustrating as it may be.

The fault with Premiere in this mix, is that Dublin core has been broken and remains so - unable to read the Type 2 clip user names. This wouldn't help with file reconnection though since the request would be for the physical filename. Here's to hoping Adobe Prelude will be able to fix these poor AVCCAM naming schemes.

For the longest time (even when we were an FCP-centric outfit) I use an automator action to create a set of folders that is consistent across all projects. Like Matt's example, it has a series of folders they are:
Audio Post​
Color Corrected Media
Compressor & AME Workflows
DVD Projects
Dailies
Deliverables
Graphics & Images
Masters
Miscellaneous Assets
Motion Graphics Projects
Premiere Pro Projects
Production Media
Project Media
Scripts & Notes
Titles
Workprints​


Here's a zip file of the automator action (was re-saved on 10.7 but I can dig up a 10.6 version if it doesn't work and you're interested). You can edit/customize it by using automator to open it, but otherwise just double-click on it and it will ask you what you want to name the project and where you want to put all these folders and then it will create them for you. This version's default starting location was set to "Desktop" because our in-use version defaults to a shared storage array. You can use automator to change the default if you always use the same storage location as well.

I hope it helps someone! Organization is key - AVCCAM naming structure or not.

And yes, this is all just, like, my opinion, man. ;)
 
Good discussion indeed - but I think the OP is the only one to really hit the nail on the head with respect to this issue. And that is that this is a pretty huge issue, and not one to blame on poor user practices. For big projects or big archives, it's a huge problem. FCP was/is much smarter in that it at least remembered the folder in which the offline clip used to live. So if you moved all your folders en masse you could reconnect en masse regardless of filename uniqueness as long as your containing folders retained the same name.


While we all understand it's not great practice to have non-unique file names, it is inevitable at times, and more so as things scale up. And just saying not to do that is not helping anybody out who is already in that situation - or, as often happens, has had that situation forced upon them. Moving and renaming folders is also an inevitable part of working with huge amounts of media.


The OP seems to be asking this: am I missing something or is Premiere this bad when it comes to media relinking. And if it really is this bad, are there any tricks or workarounds anybody knows of?


That's exactly my questions as well. From what I can tell, Premiere is really that bad (more on that below). The only tip I've heard is the hidden date-sort trick above - which is great and could be a life saver. Thanks a million for that cause I don't think I would have figured that one out on my own.


This might sound obvious, but here's something else that might help: move things one folder at a time. Move, relink, repeat. Doesn't help if you're already stuck. And the other bad news is that you not only have to do that for every folder, but that you also have to do that for every PPro project that uses that particular folder before you move on to the next folder.


After that minor contribution, I'll move on to my rant.... The take home for me is that Premiere seems to be really really dumb when it comes to relinking. Contrary to what somebody said above, it would not be a difficult programming task to mitigate this problem. FCP does it by simply telling you the path where it thinks the offline file should be - which is crucial information and will lead to the right place as long as you've kept your containing folder names intact. It would also be helpful to remember a few other things about the offline clips - really anything (size, modified date, or better still a checksum) would help you identify the right clip with certainty. If it were really smart it would remember this info, do the comparisons and do some automated searching or at least make suggestions. It's not rocket science. As it stands premiere doesn't no seem to retain anything other than the file name - which is pretty sad. You are presented only with this information: "Link Media to 00001.MTS" ...Really? Help me out, Premiere, that's all you can tell me about this file? Even if that happened to be a uniquely named file, Premiere doesn't do us any favors in helping find it.


And even with cameras that don't reset to 0000 on every card (Red, P2 etc), or good logging/naming practices there's no guarantee you won't have some dupes. Which is why I think it's on Adobe to put some more intelligence in it's relinking. Any intelligence, actually, would be great. Don't get me wrong, once you point it to the first correct file, it's very intelligent about finding other files, but that's not what we're talking about here.


This issue is probably the most significant concern we've come across in the transition from FCP to Adobe at our shop. If PPro didn't tout it's ability to edit everything natively, it wouldn't be so frustrating. It's a pretty big caveat to say that while, sure, you can edit anything natively, you either have to pre-screen or pre-name every clip you ever want to work with to ensure uniqueness, or never ever ever move any media to a different location. Those caveats are pretty major inconveniences.


Any other thread links on this, or general insights are greatly appreciated. I've googled around quite a bit and this thread is the best I've found on the topic.
 
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