preference manager from digital rebellion

#Preference manager from digital rebellion manual#
#Preference manager from digital rebellion pro#

Premiere does an OK job of trying to relink things, but it can be really slow and fail to find stuff – sometimes it can cost minutes, sometimes hours (sometimes days!).Ī simple rename using a Grep pattern find & replace can change every file path and/or file name instantly.

Imagine that you’ve been given a whole bunch of media to relink between proxies and masters – but the names aren’t the same, and they’re not even in the same directory structure. If you can’t quite figure out why this is useful as a Premiere support tool, 80% of it is about relinking and renaming.

In a Sony XDCAM or XAVC MXF file, you’ll find the whole metadata XML written into the file. In a Quicktime, you can see all the XMP text metadata that Premiere and Prelude have injected into the file itself.

When you search for individual items in a Project or Preference file, you don’t just get one of those annoying search boxes with a Next arrow which lets you skip through one by one – it pops up a page of clickable search results, with every reference to that word, so that you can just skim through the results and jump to the one you want.Īnd for bonus points, try opening up a Media file in Text Wrangler.

You can also do Find & Replace with Grep patterns on multiple files in this panel.

It has a Multi-File Search option, which lets you select a folder (and its subfolders) and find what you’re looking for in multiple Project files – useful when you’re trying to find any one of a hundred projects that contains a certain clip, for instance.

It has a Find and Replace dialog with a Grep option, which means you can search for patterns of text using wildcards (in fact, using a whole regex-style shortcut system) and replace and rebuild incredibly complicated chunks of text – from file paths and names, to clip metadata.

prproj project files as if they were uncompressed plain text, and makes the editable.

#Preference manager from digital rebellion manual#

But hidden beneath the surface are four super powers – which individually may not amount to much, but which together can save you amazing amounts of time and manual work: Text Wrangler has assumed the disguise of a mild-mannered text editor. I’m embarrassed of the number of times I’ve said, “Text Wrangler is my favourite thing.”

#Preference manager from digital rebellion pro#

They give it away for free, which seems bananas, but I think must be a way of attracting you to look at the other cool stuff they make (like Pro Maintenance and Pro Media Tools, Cut Notes and Kollaborate). It’s made by the amazing Digital Rebellion. Preference Manager has been around for years – we’ve been using it since at least 2010 I think – and has added support for lots of creative editing tools in addition to Adobe CC – Avid, FCP, Motion, Lightworks, ProTools, Logic. One file that you can use to set preferences on every machine in your environment, and reset again and again. When you’ve set your user preferences up in Premiere and AME and AE for the first time (and I’ll cover prefs in a future post) you can use Preference Manager to save them, and then when they get all mucky later on, you can just trash them and reset them to their saved state.Įven better, you can copy them out as package file and deploy them onto other machines. To be totally sure that you’re getting a proper clean set every time, you need Preference Manager. I know that Creative Cloud lets you share and clean up preferences, but it does it in a really unhelpful way – it’s like the sponge that the ancient Romans used to share in their communal toilets. You need to keep them consistent, clear them up after someone’s messed with them, and trash them when the system goes insane. The key to a long and happy life in editing support is to manage everyone’s preferences. There are three tools that we use regularly to make this easier

At my work, we do a lot of Adobe Premiere support for broadcast, news and corporate in-house teams running big shared storage networks, with a mix of Macs and PCs (mostly Macs) – configuring the networks for performance, defining workflows, and helping the creative teams use Premiere, After Effects, etc.Ĭollectively, there are hundreds of users and machines pushing the technology hard with Petabytes of raw footage, and they all need support for tight deadlines – their systems have to be set up in a consistent way, cleared down, and issues resolved as soon as humanly possible.