Here's the situation. I have a 2TB project. Client wants revisions made while I'm on the road - fortunately, I'm only using 2% of media in final edit, and even then, can edit with proxy files, so it's easy to get my project down to a few hundred GBs to take on the road. We use project manager, only export a couple timelines, transcode, and VOILA! It's great and works well (although better progress bar indications would be nice.)

HOWEVER, if I ever want to RE-LINK or RE-MERGE my changes BACK into my original project file on desktop edit environment, and re-link to full rez media, it's a no-go, because the project manager, when it transcoded, turned the three different instances of Clip0056 into Clip0056001, Clip0056002, and 003. It also put them all in the same folder.

So, this means if I EVER want to edit using my gull rez media, or have the whole project under one roof again, I must MANUALLY re-link every file, first because the folder structure is totally destroyed, and second the "find" function doesn't work on any of the clips with _001 appended to them. This has sucked HOURS of my day before.

This connects to broader re-linking headaches. Can we not just start giving a clip a unique 15-character alphanumeric ID upon import, write it to metadata, and stop worrying about filenames, extensions, foler structures, etc, and just MAKE RELINK WORK?