How to Collaborate on Premiere Pro
Working collaboratively on a video editing project used to consist of writing down timecodes with notes, but luckily those days are behind us. Adobe Premiere Pro offers some robust collaboration tools.
There are two different ways to create a collaborative project in Premiere Pro, and each comes with its own advantage and disadvantages.
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How to Collaborate on Premiere Pro
Team Projects
The first option is a team project. This is a great solution for remote teams, but it’s not always the best choice. It doesn’t play nice with large amounts of data, and it has trouble when different users have different file paths for their source files. However, it is very good at fixing conflicts when different users make updates.
Shared Projects
Shared projects is the other collaboration tool, but is more ideal for when a team is working in the same space and on the same local network. There are some great benefits to using this method. For one thing, media added to the project by one person, will be available to everyone, since you’re sourcing the files from a central location instead of from your own computer. Everyone’s project will look exactly the same, and its impossible for conflicts to occur if set up properly.
To prevent other editors from overwriting or conflicting with work that you’re actively editing, you need to lock the project. Go to your preferences, click on Collaboration, select to enable Project Locking, then give yourself a username. This isn’t unique to your project – you’ll only ever need to set this up once. Now for all collaborative projects, you’ll be able to use project locking, and show up as your chosen username.
The next setting you should change is also in preferences, but in the Media tab. Check the box that says Automatically Hide Dependent Clips”. This setting helps to avoid the mess that referenced files can create, and will hide reference clips that you take from other projects, instead only showing original files.
Start by creating a master project. Within this master project, you can create shared projects. To create your first shared project, click on the new item button in the project panel and select Project Shortcut. Once your shared projects are ready, set the master project to Read Only. Do this by clicking on the green pencil icon in the bottom left corner of the screen. This will toggle the lock on so that no other users can make add or remove projects. You can also lock and unlock all of the individual shared projects by opening them and then toggling the pencil button. Enabling this will make it so that no changes can be made to a shared project by someone else, while you’re working on it. In the project panel, click on the Metadata Display options and add Project Locked. The Project Locked column will show who has it open, so that it’s easier to know who to talk to if you really need to edit something yourself in that project. This goes back to when we enabled locked projects and created a name for the workstation. It’s important that each workstation has a unique name, so you can quickly identify them.
It’s worth noting that even though you can’t edit a locked project, you can still use the source files from it to work on a non-locked timeline. So just because someone is editing a certain project, doesn’t mean you can’t also access their assets.
If there is a green pencil symbol next to a project folder, that means you have read and write permissions, and can edit as normal. Whenever you go to edit a project, make sure to lock it before you make any changes so that no one else can access it, and save the project when you’re done.
One of the best parts of the organization of shared projects is that nothing is set in stone. You can easily organize projects any way that works for your team. However, it is best practice to keep your master project empty of sequences and files, and instead only use shared project folders to better organize all of your assets and specific projects.
Thanks for checking out this FilterGrade tutorial! Hopefully this helps you understand collaborative projects and makes your workflow easier when working with a team. Have fun with your team projects! Watch more videos here.
