If you saw our article a few weeks ago, you’ll know that relinking in Premiere Pro is a bit of a weak spot currently. The particular article had to do with relinking R3D and MOV files, but all around relinking to files that were not your originals is poor. In this video, we go over some tips to get R3D files to actually relink to MOV files. Please proceed with caution as I haven’t done too much testing on this workflow.
A few steps that I didn’t mention in the video, are that I separated out the .R3D files out of all of their original subfolders. I did this by going into the folder that contained them, doing a finder search for .R3D and taking the results of that search and copying them into a new folder. You could also drag them into another folder, but be aware you are messing with the original folder structure. I don’t think there will be any real impact of this, but of course, proceed with caution and make sure no one else is already working with the files in their current structure. Another good step is to make sure the proxy folder structure matches the RED folder structures. So if you move all of your R3Ds out of their folder into a folder hierarchy like REDFiles/Shoot/Day1/CameraA, you should repeat that structure in your proxy, PROXYFiles/Shoot/Day1/CameraA.
You’ll see that this workflow is more of a workaround. So please make sure that Adobe knows we need proper metadata based relinking by sending them a feature request.
You can download the automator app that I used in the video, here.