Suggestion for better project management in Premiere

We are a post-production facility with 50 copies of Premiere. One the the most difficult things to establish is proper project management. We had in place a set of custom built utilities that could change the various cache folders in Premiere automatically at startup, but this stopped working when the Premiere API broke these functions over a year ago. It would be more desirable to be able to set these things within Premiere itself in a manner that allows customization by a facility. Here are my suggestions:

Currently, Premiere's "Project Settings" contains seven "Scratch Disk" settings. These can be set to:

-Documents (local on the system disk usually, so less than desirable in a production environment)
-Custom (Must be manually set, navigating through many directories)
-Project (Dumping everything into the root location of the project, again not desirable in a production environment)

We are aware that there are "forcing" option in some startup premiere scripts, but these are constant and do not lend themselves to flexibility per project.

The problem in the current system is that there is either too much initial setup needed by a user at the start of a project, or the settings are too "hard-coded" to allow flexibility.

I would like to propose the following:
Premiere should allow a series of user defined variables that are accessible in Scratch Disks preferences (and other places if possible). An example should demonstrate:

At Premiere launch, the app checks for a text file in the base installation folder of the application named "GlobalProjectVariables.txt". This file would represent variables to be used *for all users launching Premiere". In this file would be (if Present) something along the lines of

ProjectsFolder="S:\PremiereJobs"
CapturedVideoFolder="Captured"
CapturedAudioFolder="Captured"
VideoPreviewsFolder="Previews"
AudioPreviewsFolder="Previews"
AutoSavesFolder="AutoSaves"
CCLibrariesDownloadsFolder="Libraries"
MGTemplateMediaFolder="MGTemplatMedia"

After reading this file, Premiere would check for the existance of a second file, to be located in the user's local premiere preference location i.e. Documents, if it exists. This file would allow per-user variables to be read (if present) and would be named "PerUserProjectVariables.txt".

A new menu item would be added (by Adobe) to the File menu, named PremiereVariables. When selected, this would present a list of current global and per-user variables as follows:

GLOBAL PROJECT VARIABLES:
<list those as present in the "GlobalUserVariables.txt" file mentioned previously, shown as READ-ONLY)>

PERUSER PROJECT VARIABLES:
<list those as present in the "PerUserProjectVariables.txt" file mentioned previously. The user can alter these variables, which would update the PerUserProjectVariables file appropriately.>
The user would enter a variable for his/her project name, i.e. MyCurrentProject="AdobeCommercialOne"

NOTE: Showing these variables as readonly allows for better troubleshooting while preventing the original files from being altered by casual users.

Administration personel would setup preferences/projectSettings to look like this:
Captured Video: $ProjectsFolder\$MyCurrentProject\$CapturedVideoFolder
Captured Audio: $ProjectsFolder\$MyCurrentProject\$CapturedAudioFolder
Captured Preview: $ProjectsFolder\$MyCurrentProject\$VideoPreviewsFolder
Project Auto Save: $ProjectsFolder\$MyCurrentProject\$AutoSavesFolder
....etc.

At this point, the user never again need to change the Premiere Project Settings. Changing projects and re-routing all the inherent Scratch Disks is as simple as goint into the User Variables menu item and changing the $MyCurrentProject variable to the new project name. Of course, the variables files should be re-read without having to restart Premiere for ease of use.

I believe this would represent a leap forward in day-to-day Premiere use where multiple projects are performed on machines by multiple users daily. Should you have any questions regarding this suggestion, please feel free to contact me.

Pancake timelines are one of the most useful features in Premiere Pro. They also take time to set up. Editors open multiple timelines in the Source Monitor, Open in Timeline, arrange pancake timelines, and order their timelines. Then they can work. The problem is that Premiere does not remember what is open in the Source Monitor when you save and quit. So when the project reloads, there will be a random timeline or two open in the Program Monitor and they have to set up all over again. On a complex project this eats time (not to mention doing it after every crash). My request is for Premiere to remember what you've loaded in the Source Monitor, including timelines. Frankly most users see this as a bug, because the project should reopen the way the user left it – including open sources. Thanks! – DYLAN

When synchronising large amounts of audio and video, working solely from the timeline or creating merged clips one-by-one is messy and tedious. Ideally, it should be possible to automatically synchronise media from a bin or the project panel, so a pile of separate audio and video becomes a neat list of synchronised merged clips.

Avid has this sorted with their AutoSync feature, which has existed for years. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4frJqkc5EI) This feature looks and works much like Premiere's existing 'Synchronise' option, except that rather than synchronising media on a timeline, it acts on media selected in a bin, and creates synchronised subclips from that media.

Premiere almost has this feature. Selecting a number of audio and media files in a bin, right clicking and selecting 'Create Multi-Camera Source Sequence' does allow the user to turn a bunch of audio and video files into nicely organised and synchronised media - even moving the original media to a 'Processed Clips' bin to keep the project tidy, but the resulting clips are obviously multicam sequences rather than merged clips.

Many editors choose to then edit with these multicam sequences, though this is less than ideal, and requires work to clean up before delivery (https://blog.frame.io/2018/05/14/premiere-batch-syncing/)

If I want to create merged clips from these sequences, I have to drag them into a new sequence, flatten the multicam sequences, and then go through one-by-one and create merged clips. This is only marginally faster than creating merged clips one-by-one in the project panel, but at least I don't have to figure out which audio file goes with which video file by hand.

Ideally, Premiere would offer an option that works exactly like 'Create Multi-Camera Source Sequences', except that the resulting media is merged clips rather than multicam sequences.

In the Project panel, it would be great if there were a way to expand and collapse all sub-bins/folders within a bin/folder. This would significantly speed up workflows that involve media that automatically generate bins/folders, such as R3D files that exceed the camera's file system limit of 4 GB per clip. Since the clips are automatically re-stitched in Premiere, I really just need to get at one of those clips in each of the sub-bins. Currently, I have to expand all sub-bins individually. In my mind, this could be a right-click feature—right click on the parent bin, and there'd be an option for Expand/Collapse All Sub-bins. Something like that. Thanks!

Sometimes one doesn't merely want to switch off the proxies, but actually destroy the relationship between the clips in premiere and those proxy files.

If you simply move or delete those files, Premiere freaks out about it and tells you it can't find them every time you open a project. There's no way to tell it not to expect them even after clicking 'offline all' for a given session.

Also, the proxies REALLY mess up the project manager so until that can be fixed, one way around that would be remove their existence from a project altogether so the project manager can't be confused by them.

It is unfathomable that in 2019 we still have to waste sooooo much of our time with this broken archaic tool!! I keep getting error message upon error message when i try to simply copy sound files over. You should be able in the first part to just select the clips you want to consolidate, right clip and then boom. Like FCP7 has been able to do for the last decade of it's life. Why in god's name do we only have the option to select sequences??? And to top it all off, it doesnt even work as error message upon error message pops up whenever I try to just collect and copy. Really guys, with Premiere its 2 steps forward 2 steps back. We are not getting anywhere.