Make Relink Great Again
I jest. Relink has never been great. Sometimes folder structures are not respected. Sometimes premiere is convinced a file is not what file I tell it is. I don't even know how to relink a proxy vs a full rez clip.
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? I want to be able to point a project to a folder and say "it's all there, please figure it out" and have it work.
on the same note, Premiere should be able to see "oh, there are two versions of clip ID####. one is an R3D file, and one is an H264 file. I think I can guess which is the proxy and which is the master file...

1 comment
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Mel Matsuoka commented
This is theoretically a "great" idea, and one that I had originally suggested in years previous. However, I have since learned that there is nothing more annoying to someone for whom media management and data integrity is of important importance for an external process to write metadata into files behind their back. Doing so will invalidate file checksums and file modification times, which can wreak utter havoc with automated workflows.
A possible workaround--at least on macOS--is to store this type of metadata in the file's extended attributes (xattrs), but this is a very platform--and filesystem/network filesystem--dependent solution which might end up being more problematic than is worth it.