New in Adobe Premiere Pro Spring 2020: Productions & Public Beta
On April 14, 2020 Adobe introduced Productions to Adobe Premiere Pro Version 14.1. Productions is designed to help editors scale, collaborate, and edit seamlessly on larger film or productions. Of course, you can still create standard Premiere Pro project files, Productions is just a new option.
Premiere’s Production’s Panel is an evolution of a shared project, it’s essentially a special type of project folder, which contains multiple Premiere Pro Projects that you can edit simultaneously with others.
To help explain this, below is a side-by-side of a standard Premiere Pro project panel and a Premiere production panel. Instead of Bins (like in a project), Productions has Folders. Instead of sequences (like in a Project), Productions has project files.
Since a Production acts similarly to a folder, the Production panel reflects what is within your Production folder on your local shared storage or drive.
So if you make an edit to the name of a project file in the Production Panel, you’ll see that it is changed on your disk. And vice versa, if you make an update on your disk, the change is reflected in the Production panel.
Productions Panel mirrors the Production Folder on your local disk.
And who is Productions for?
While the Adobe Team designed Productions for multiple editors who need to edit collaboratively on a Production, like a film or tv show, you can also use Productions by yourself to better organize and speed up projects with lots of media. By breaking up clips, sequences, and projects into smaller projects within a production, you can have faster open and save times to speed up your workflow.
But, how do you setup your first Premiere Production?
Shared Storage
You can save a Production locally like on your internal SSD or external SSD (Why SSD and not HDD?), but if you need other editors to access it, you need to use some type of shared storage solution. You can use a NAS, networked attached storage, such as the SNS EVO Prodigy, but you can also use consumer file syncing services like DropBox and Google Drive. I’m currently using Drive to share my Production and media with another editor.
Where is the media stored?
Your media (such as the footage, audio, music etc), should be stored in the same drive as your Production. If you are working with a team of editors off of a server, your production and all the media should be on that same server so everyone can access. For example, your team can make a “Master Media” folder on your shared drive from which all the projects source media from. If you are working for yourself off of a local drive, save your Production and the media in that same folder on your drive.
To recap, a Production contains Premiere Project files and the Project files source media from any “Master Media” folder you setup, a Production panel does not have media inside it, the projects do.
Update Your Preferences
To create a production, first update your preference to the following:
First, go to preferences > media and uncheck the following:
Write XMP ID to Files on Import
Write Clips Markers to XMP
Enable Clip and XMP Meta Linking
Then, from Preferences > Collaboration
Make sure that Enable Project Locking is checked
Enter a user Name that others see when you open a project, so people will see me as gal
Note: It’s still recommended, however, to store your media cache on your local drive for speed,
Also, from Window > Workspaces, uncheck Import Workspaces from Projects. This will avoid workspace changes when opening projects from other editors.
Creating the Production
Go to File > New > Production, and give it a name, then you can choose the file path, I’m going to select my Premiere Productions folder on my Google Drive, and I’ll call this “Production 1. “
And now Premiere will open up a new Production and from here you can make a new folder in this panel by clicking on the folder icon at the bottom of the panel. For this I’ll name this folder “01 Chapters.” From here, you can make as many Premiere projects as you like by clicking on the new project icon. It’s recommended to organize your projects into folders.
Also, you can go to the hamburger menu next to the Production panel and select “Reveal the Production in Your Finder” (on a mac) or Explorer if you are using Windows.
You will see that within the Production folder on your disk you can find the “01 Chapters” folder that was created in the Production panel along with the three projects.
You’ll also notice that there is a .prodset file within the root folder of your Productions folder, do not open, move or rename this file. The scratch disk and auto-save is also saved in the same location as your production folder.
And then, you can of course add an existing premiere pro project to the production, by clicking here on the Hamburger menu and add project to production.
What about the new icons in the Production panel?
Once your production is farther along, you will start to see some different icons, so let me go over what this all means.
The green pen means you can edit the project.
A hollow outlined icon means it is not open and closed on your system.
The solid icon means the project is open on your system, but it’s on read only mode, you can right click on it to change it to a read-write mode.
The red lock means someone else is editing the project. The name next to it shows who is editing your projects.
Say Goodbye to Duplicate Media
When you open up any project within your Production panel it will have its own Project Panel, with its own sequences and media. If you open up a sequence, you can right-click on the clip in the timeline to reveal which project the media is in if you need to locate the source and drag it into another sequence.
This allows you to use the same source media in all your Production projects, no duplicate media!
Creative Assets for Production Teams
And, if you are looking for creative assets to share amongst your team or collaborators I recommend subscribing to Envato Elements. For a small monthly fee, you can get unlimited .mogrts (motion graphics templates), transition templates, music, sfx, stock video to use within your production. And everyone on your team can login and download the assets they need. Here are some of my favorite assets from Envato Elements.
Public Beta
Lastly, Adobe Creative cloud introduced a public beta for Adobe Creative Cloud subscribers. From the Adobe Creative Desktop App, you can now go to a section called Beta, and open it up to test out new features the Adobe team is working on.
Let me know what you think about Productions!