This isn’t one of our usual video tutorial posts. It is in fact not even a piece of information that we want to share with you. It is more of a question than anything else?
How do you guys deal with relinking in Premiere Pro? Now, one obvious answer might be to use our product, reLink reTooled. reLink reTooled was created to facilitate certain workflows in Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro 7, and make it easier to relink files with different lengths, filenames, etc. It was more designed for an offline to online workflow with color corrected finals or an effects workflow where clip duration and file names are likely to change all of the time. I understand why this type of workflow is harder for the NLE makers to address. It involves complicated combinations of metadata based relinking.
What I don’t understand, however, is why it is so difficult to relink files that are merely proxy versions of full resolution media. Let’s say you transcode your .R3D source files to prores to make it easier on your system to edit. Then, your plan is to relink to the .R3D for the final color correct in SpeedGrade or Premiere Pro. You would think this would be fairly easy, use Premiere’s Link dialogue box and point it to the directory where the .R3D is stored. Sure, it has the same name, same duration, but Premiere can’t seem to find it. So instead of a nice automatic process, you are faced with relinking each one of your hundreds of clips one at a time. Now, if you wanted to go from .R3D, to MOV you could in fact use reLink reTooled, but because we only support .MOV files as your final relinking media, the opposite is not the case.
I bring up this frustration, because as an editor, it’s something I see daily. It’s something every person I’ve ever talked to who works with .R3D files in Premiere has brought up to me. It’s something people come to reTooled.net hoping that our product can do, and YES I wish it could too. But we are a small company and don’t have a lot of resources to throw at something that Adobe should be addressing.
Don’t get me wrong, the Adobe engineers have been very hard at work over the last few years, and Premiere Pro has matured into an amazing application. I just hope that this huge shortcoming is on their list of things to do. If you agree with me, please let them know.
File a feature request and let them know how important this workflow is to editors.
Update: I’ve heard from someone at Adobe, and there might be an additional step that would make this a lot more fluid. Unfortunately I’m away from the office at a shoot this week and can’t test the workflow. I’ll keep you guys posted when I’m able to test.
Update 2: Unfortunately after doing some further testing, I’m still having no luck. I’ll keep you posted if I figure anything else out.