Improved Project Management
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.
