The Ultimate Guide to Premiere Pro Productions

When Productions was introduced to Premiere Pro in 2020 it was a huge step forward in collaboration tools for Adobe, helping to take some of the editing strain out of feature films and series-length shows.

With Productions, unwieldy projects were suddenly a breeze to manage, and (most importantly) ensured that Premiere Pro would be stable even with huge amounts of footage. It was a true game changer.

What exactly is a Premiere Pro production?

A production is a collection of Premiere Pro projects located in a common folder, linked via a Production file that stores info about all of them. The project files share the same assets, allowing for better performance on large projects.

Put simply, a Production is a way of organizing a bunch of projects.

In the Premiere Pro Best Practices Guide we (meaning me and the Premiere Pro “Hollywood team”) wrote this explanation: “A Production is a collection of Premiere Pro project files inside a folder that can be thought of as a cohesive unit.”

So in a practical sense, a Production is a folder on your disk containing project files and maybe subfolders with more project files, and a file that keeps track of it all—the .prodset file. The project files in the Production share settings and metadata. Do not open, move or rename this file.

The Production folder replaces the old standalone .prproj file, and smaller projects replace what used to be bins inside the .prproj file. Multiple editors can open a Production at any time, but they only open the projects that they are actively working on.

You can only have one Production open at a time, but since you can have multiple seasons of a series in one Production, this isn’t much of a limitation.

Note: For Avid users, think of each project file inside a Premiere Pro Production like an Avid bin, and think of project locking as bin locking.

Limitations of the “old” project format

Productions is Adobe’s solution to the limitations of the old Premiere Pro project file format. The traditional Premiere Pro project file (.prproj) is an XML based format, and when you open a project file, Premiere Pro has to then find all of the footage in all of the sequences in the whole project.

It will also store a huge number of things in RAM, so the RAM usage grows with the project size. The larger the project gets, the longer it takes to open and save, too. So it’s not the ideal solution for working with thousands and thousands of clips. Not only that, but importing projects into other projects can create duplicate clips, which can be an organizational challenge.

Another limitation is that only one editor can open a project file at a time if you want to avoid trouble. For example, if you have editors working on the same .prproj file in a DropBox or OneDrive folder, the last one to hit Save overwrites everything all the other editors have done. That is not collaboration.

So Premiere Pro Productions provide a much better organizational and collaborative experience for creative teams, and more responsive projects for teams and for single users.

Why should I use Premiere Productions?

The major benefit of Productions is that Premiere Pro won’t need to have everything loaded into RAM all the time. The key feature in a Production is Cross-project clip referencing. This means your editing project doesn’t have to have all the media loaded. Only the media in the timeline is active, which makes the project faster and more stable.

Cross-project clip referencing also means that if you need to see the source in its bin, you can right-click on a clip in your timeline, choose Reveal in Project, and the project where that clip lives will open, showing the clip in the bin.

Benefits of cross-project clip referencing:

• Project scale can be massive.
• Users all see the same thing in the Production, so everything stays in sync.
• Clips and sequences can live in different projects, keeping projects small and responsive.
• Resources are managed automatically and only what’s needed is opened.
• Projects save quickly and feel snappy.
• All the clips have one single reference, or source clip, avoiding unnecessary duplication.
• Sequences can be copied from one project to another without duplicating media.
• Projects (like sound FX archives) can easily be reused in other Productions.
• Collaboration is easy. Project locking allows sharing of open projects without fear of overwriting or corrupting work.
• Source clip effects, markers, and multi-camera sequences can be shared between projects.

A note about security: You don’t need to be connected to the internet for a Production workflow. Productions were built to work both in “sandboxed” projects, and for teams working remotely.

Premiere Productions use cases

Productions are an absolute must on feature films, documentaries, and series, where large projects can be divided into smaller, much more responsive projects

They’re also great for smaller projects, like a YouTube channel where lots of episodes can live in the same Production, making it super-easy to re-use material from earlier episodes, and to have graphics and stock media always available. Content creators for any social media channel would benefit from the same features.

Even as a solo editor you can keep your reusable sources, like sound effects, graphics, archival media, and music library in separate projects, always available in any other project without bloating the main project file, reducing the time it takes to open and save your project.

Want a stable, snappy and fast project? Use Productions.

What’s the difference between a Production and a Team Project?

A Premiere Pro Team Project is stored as a database on the Creative Cloud server, and handles changes to sequences, bins, comps, etc. between team members. Yes, comps—it can also contain After Effects projects. It saves every step in the background, so you don’t have to hit Save. You can even see old versions in the Media Browser and revert changes to a sequence in an instant. The media in a Team Project can live anywhere. Even in different locations on separate systems—but you still need some way to share your media, of course. In a Team Project, nothing is locked, and editors can choose when to share their changes.

Premiere Team Projects are very flexible, work really well for small teams, businesses, or individuals, and on short form projects. It’s when a project gets really complex that you’d be better off using a Production in Premiere Pro. Yes, it’s really about complexity, not about length, and definitely not about the size of the media files. “My project has 14 terabytes of media” doesn’t tell us anything about the complexity.

It’s really about complexity, not about length, and definitely not about the size of the media files.

Everything you’ve added to a timeline, like cut, a volume keyframe, a transition, a layered graphic clip, an effect, captions, etc. will add to the complexity of the sequence. And every complex sequence you add to a project will add to the overall complexity of the project (so keeping “backups” of sequences in your main project is not a good idea).

Keeping all the media files in one project increases the time it takes to open it and save it. Keeping all sequences in one project makes it slow. In a Production, you can split everything into smaller projects, which makes Productions robust enough to handle hundreds of thousands of clips and thousands of sequences. The Productions workflow uses the good old .prproj file format for projects, and they’re all organized together in a Production.

Also, with a Premiere Production, nothing is on the cloud unless you put it there. If needed, you can do all your work air-gapped, without an internet connection.

Creating a Production in Premiere Pro

First, create a parent folder in Finder or Explorer where you want to keep the production. It’s important that this is a location that all the editors can access. If you’re all on shared storage in a facility—either physically or remote access—you’re good. If the team is spread in different locations, you may want to use a cloud-based storage solution. Premiere Pro doesn’t really care how you set this up, as long as everyone has access to the same folder.

To create the Production, click File->New->Production and navigate to that shared folder before you hit Create.

This creates a subfolder with the name you entered, and inside there’s now an untitled project, a .prlock file, and a .prodset file.

“Untitled” is a bad name for a project, so rename it in the Production panel in Premiere Pro. This will update the project file and the .prlock file on your drive. 

Project Settings in the File menu will be grayed out. Instead, we have Production Settings available in File->Production Settings. Changes you make here are stored in the .prodset file, and will apply to all the projects and all the users in the Production. Technically, each project still has Project Settings, but they are ignored in the Production.

Do NOT move, delete, or modify the .prodset file manually.

Not all settings will always be exactly the same. If a Production is made by a Windows user and set to use the CUDA or OpenCL renderer, the macOS user will get the closest thing—which will be Metal.

Ingest Settings are disabled in a Production. You can still ingest into a standalone project—maybe creating proxies automatically—and add that project to the Production.

When you create a new project via the Production Panel, or use the Add Project to Production command, a unique Project ID is assigned. Never move or copy projects manually into a production folder or store your media in a production folder if you want to avoid trouble.

The only items that should be inside your Production folder are folders, subfolders and Premiere Pro project files.

Tip: There’s a workspace layout in Premiere Pro named Production that you may want to try.

Recommended changes to Preferences

Open Preferences->Media in your Production and make sure the following settings are disabled:

• Write XMP ID to files on import
• Write Clip Markers to XMP
• Enable Clip and XMP Metadata Linking

Also, uncheck Import Workspace from Projects under Window->Workspaces so your workspace doesn’t constantly change when you open projects and need to be reset. Different editors in the Production may have different monitors, or different layout preferences.

Project locking

Under Preferences->Collaboration, Project Locking should be enabled automatically. Make sure your username is set to something meaningful.

The name can be your actual name, the name of your edit bay, or even your phone number, so other people know who to ask “Are you still working on that project, or have you just forgotten to close it?”

When you open a project for editing, it gets a green pencil icon. Under the hood it creates a tiny text file with the .prlock file extension, which locks the project for other editors. If you ever need to edit this .prlock file, make sure you’re doing it when the Production is closed. Manually deleting the .prlock file may result in multiple editors overwriting each other’s work!

To change a project lock status, click the green pencil icon or red lock icon in the Project panel, or right-click the project in the Production panel and select Read/Write Mode or Read/Only Mode.

Editors can still open a locked project as a read only project to scrub through it and copy stuff from it, even use them as source sequences in a pancake editing setup, but they can’t do any editing in there.

Note: If you’re using syncing services like DropBox, the .prlock file may not sync fast enough for the project locking to work properly. Keeping a chat channel open to tell other editors you’re opening a project can help get around this shortcoming.

Tip: If you forget where your production folder is located you can easily navigate there by choosing Reveal Production in Finder/Explorer in the panel menu of the Production panel.

What do the icons mean?

The Production panel shows the state of projects through variations of the project icons:

• A filled icon indicates a project is opened on your system.
• A gray outline indicates a project is not open on your system.
• A green pen icon indicates that you have write access to a project.
• A red lock indicates someone else is editing a project.

You can have combinations of these icons, of course.

• Filled and with a green pencil = Opened on your system in Read/Write mode.
• Hollow and with a Red lock = Opened by someone else.
• Filled and with a Red lock = Opened by someone else, and by you in Read Only mode.

The Project panel also shows a lock icon after the project name, and the name of the editor when someone else is editing in a project. And there will be a lock icon by the sequence name in the timeline panel and another one in the bottom left corner of the Project panel, telling you very clearly that the project is locked.

A yellow exclamation point beside the lock icon in the Project panel means another editor has shared changes to the project you have open in Read Only mode, and you need to choose Refresh Project in the project panel menu to see the changes. No need to close and re-open the project.

If you’ve worked with Team Projects, you may wonder how you share a Production, and invite team members. The answer is: You don’t!

Anyone with access to the Production folder and a Premiere Pro subscription can just click File->Open Production and navigate to the folder.

Shared storage

If you’re using Productions in a team, you definitely want to keep your Production folder on some kind of shared storage. It can be a Network Attached Storage (NAS), cloud-based storage like LucidLink, or some kind of decentralized collaboration storage with folder syncing. Just be aware that some folder syncing solutions may not update quickly enough for project locking to be reliable. The .prlock file will not arrive immediately on all systems, but will take a while to sync.

Scratch disks can safely be set to Same as Production, as it will create folders at the level above the Production folder, not inside it. You can still set a custom Scratch Disk location if you want.

If you’re using a folder syncing solution, be aware that Auto-Saves may fail to save to the folder specified by the Production settings, in which case it will revert to the default for a project, which is in the same folder as the project. This will clutter your production with Auto-Save folders and projects.

Productions work well with virtual computing systems like CREE8.

It is even possible to work with “cloned” Productions, where everyone has a copy locally, and editors pass “transfer” projects between each other, but it requires a lot more manual organization for everyone involved, and good communication via chats.

There’s also a workflow where one editor “owns” the central Production and then exports out sequences to other editors using Export Selection as Premiere Project, then re-imports them after they’ve been edited by the other editors. This decentralized Productions workflow is surprisingly smooth.

Read more about using Productions on shared storage in the online help documentation.

Opening an existing Production

To open an existing Production for the first time, you can click File->Open Production, then navigate to and select the Production folder. Yes, it’s the folder that is the Production.

The Production panel will load, listing all the projects, folders, and subfolders within your Production. Open a project file from the Production panel, and Premiere Pro will load the project and show the regular interface.

Open the Production panel again to enable easy cross-project navigation.

After the first launch, the Production and any associated projects you open will appear in the Recent list in the File menu and on the Home screen for quick access.

Using a Production Template

You can build a Production template that you can duplicate in Finder/Explorer when you start a new Production, but there’s a caveat. Since the Scratch Disks settings (the file paths) are included in the .prodset file inside a Production, you can’t just duplicate an existing Production in Finder/Explorer. Even if the Scratch Disks settings in your template are set as “Same as Production,” the copies retain the absolute file path to the original Production.

A better solution is to use only the folder structure and Premiere Pro project files as a Production template—without a .prodset file.

Copy the folder to where you want to store your new Production, rename it, and then ask Premiere Pro to open a Production (File->Open Production) and point it to your new folder.

Premiere Pro will ask if you want to convert it to a Production and include all existing files and folders. Hit Convert, and you’re in business.

Warning! Cross-references between projects are written as full paths to where the other project is, and therefore creating a Production using a template with cross-references will not update the paths.

For example, having sequence projects referencing clips in media projects in your template will cause trouble. The clips will be referencing a project in the original Production template folder, which is not good. 

Keeping some self-contained project files will work fine. If you’ve spent hours organizing your sound effects into bins in a project, that could be part of your template. You can have empty media projects organized by scene or day, sequence projects with bin structures, search bins, empty sequences, graphic clips, transparent video with timecode applied to the source clip, etc. As long as there’s no cross-referencing of clips between projects going on, you should be good.

Tip: A great way to use a Production template is to keep it in a ZIP file, so there’s only one file to manage. Just unzip it to the chosen location and rename the folder when you want to start a new Production. You can also use the free tool Post Haste to save and launch your Production template.

Importing an existing project to a Premiere Production

You may want to add external projects, or maybe an auto-save to your production—or maybe just a sequence, a bin or a clip from those projects.

You may need to open a standalone project that is not part of a Production, and Premiere Pro will let you do it, and also let you know that this is what you’re doing. If you add clips from a standalone project to the timeline in a project that’s part of the Production, or drag clips or bins from the standalone project to a project that’s part of the Production, the clip will be added to the project in the Production.

You can also add a whole standalone project to a Production. Don’t do this on the Finder/Explorer level if you want to avoid trouble—it works until suddenly it doesn’t because it’s got no unique project ID.

To do this the proper way, right-click in an empty area in the Production panel and choose Add Project to Production or click the Production panel menu and choose Add Project to Production, then select the project you want to add.  

Premiere will then copy the project into the Production, convert it to the current version you’re using if necessary, give it a unique ID, and check for duplicate projects. Doing it this way maintains proper media management. Copying a project into a production folder manually using Finder or Explorer is much more likely to cause trouble.

You can also import XML files. I prefer to import the XML into a clean project in the Production to see if everything is OK before I maybe move it to another project.

Note: If you use Syncaila to sync your multicams you’ll likely get duplicated source clips, since the XML adds a separate source clip per track in multichannel audio files. You can manually replace the duplicates with just one of them, and choose channels, but it means a bit of manual labor. If the duplicate clips don’t bother you, it’s OK to keep them—but I know they bother me.

Converting an existing Premiere Pro project to a Production

You should definitely start any big project as a Production, but sometimes you’ll take over a film or series that was built in a standard project. Things are fine until the project grows too big for your system to handle, then everything starts falling apart. So you should convert this into a Premiere Pro Production before things get to this stage.

Make sure your project is not open and create a new Production as explained earlier. Add the project you want to convert to the Production using the Add Project to Production feature.

Create multiple media projects where you keep all the media bins from the old project, an edit project and an “old sequences” project. Move (don’t copy) all the bins to the projects where they belong by dragging and dropping. If the structure of the project was well thought out you may want to replicate this in the Production.

Make sure you keep all the projects open while you’re re-organizing things, so metadata can flow between the projects until everything has been moved to the new Production.

Now delete the old project from the Production and hit File->Save All. The deleted project will be kept in Trash until you decide to empty it. Close all projects you’re not actively working in, and your system should run much more smoothly.

How to move a Premiere Production

If you ever need to move both the Production folder and your media to a new location, you will need to relink all the media. Not because you moved the Production folder, but because you moved the media files.

Open all the media projects and relink. The more you have split your media into small projects, the more projects you’ll need to open and relink media to—something to keep in mind if you expect to move your Production. Keep the media projects open, and then open all the edit/sequences projects.

When you open the Production for the first time, the Scratch Disks panel will pop up, so you can confirm your choices.

Relinking a huge Production can be a pain, so try to avoid moving your media files.

How to rename a Premiere Production

To rename a Production, open the Production panel menu and choose Rename Production. This will rename the folder and the .prodset file. If this doesn’t work, someone has most likely opened a project as read/write in the Production.

You can also do it manually in Finder/Explorer, if you’re sure there are no projects still open. Make sure the name of the Production folder and the .prodset file inside match exactly.

Never rename a Production or update it to a new version of Premiere Pro while any other users have it open.

How to merge Premiere Productions

If you have been editing in two Productions, and want to merge them it’s easy if there’s no relation between them. Just copy the projects (or folders containing projects) from one Production into the folder of the other.

If the Productions were started from the same template, you may get some Duplicate ID warnings. To fix this, delete the newly added duplicate and re-add it using the Add Project to Production feature.

To merge two Productions that started from the same original Production and then were cloned to different editors, you should only bring over the projects containing new edits. Leave the source media projects to avoid duplicate source clips.

If they were started as separate Productions but are using the same media, you can copy the projects (or folders containing projects) from one Production into the folder of the other, but you’ll get duplicate source clips in different projects. You probably won’t be able to consolidate those duplicates, so the only solution if you want to get rid of them is to manually replace clips—or ignore the duplicates.

Organizing and using your Production

When you see a timeline in a Production for the first time, everything looks the same as in a standalone project. In fact, it is a normal project. But when you take a closer look at the Project panel, you may be surprised that there is no media in the project—and there are still a lot of clips in the timeline!

What kind of sorcery is this? Every media clip in the timeline must have a source clip. That’s how Premiere Pro works. So where are the source clips? They’re in one or more other projects in the Production. This is the magic of cross-project clips referencing.

The power of Productions is that you can control what your workstation loads.

This means you’ll be organizing your projects in a totally different way, and it may take some time to get used to it. But it’s so worth it!

There is no right or wrong way to organize a Production. Just as with a single project approach, a documentary will be organized very differently from a scripted feature film, or a broadcast show, a YouTube series, or TikTok shorts, or tutorials. I find myself organizing each documentary film differently too, so there are thousands of ways to do this.

I try to keep my media projects small to avoid long opening times. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to open a media project as long as you work in a sequence project. The active project only opens the clips that are needed. But when you, for some reason, need to open a media project, it’s boring to have to wait a long time, so I like smaller projects.

Depending on how much footage you have, you can organize your media projects by shoot dates, scenes, months, or any other logical structure. Breaking up into smaller projects will make Premiere Pro run smoother later in the edit, when things get more complex.

Too many small media projects can be a hassle if you ever need to move the Production or the media.

Too many small media projects can be a hassle if you ever need to move the Production or the media, as relinking media must be done in each project. Try to find a balance.

Make sure to put your multicams (multi-camera source sequences) into media projects too.

Some teams prefer to set media projects to read-only, so editors can’t accidentally mess with them.

For editing projects (sequence projects), each editor can have a personal project in the Production, or they can have projects for each scene, or whatever other logical chunks you can divide the edits into.

You can reuse the organization from Production to Production by creating a Production template as explained elsewhere in this article.

Dealing with backup/archived sequences

When cutting reel-length sequences, it’s common practice to save copies of earlier cuts. Many editors make a duplicate of yesterday’s sequence and rename it with yesterday’s date before continuing the edit. This is fine, but many editors keep these older cuts in the same project as the main edit sequence. Please don’t!

Each of these sequences has an impact on performance and, over weeks or months, those backup sequences will start bogging down the whole edit project, causing performance issues and slowing you down. The solution is super simple. Keep an “archive” project for each reel and move your date-stamped backup edits there.

Don’t keep backup copies of long sequences in your main edit project. Move them to an archive project to keep your main edit project lean and responsive.

Cutting two-hour-long sequences can also be a performance challenge. Edit in smaller chunks and have that dedicated archive project so you can open if you need to retrieve an old edit.

Don’t keep backup copies of long sequences in your main edit project. Move them to an archive project to keep your main edit project lean and responsive.

Reorganizing a Production

No matter how well you plan your Production, there will always be surprises and changes in complex video projects, and restructuring the Production as it evolves is more a rule than an exception. As you move from rough cut to fine cut, you’ll find yourself continually reorganizing the folder and project structure.

You can move a sequence from one project to another by having both projects open and simply drag it from one project panel to the other. Pressing Cmd/Ctrl before you let go will copy the sequence. Do not use Media Browser or File->Import to copy projects, as this may create duplicate clips.

You can move or rename projects if you have them open in read/write mode (green pen icon) or if they’re closed with no red lock. Moving and renaming projects or folders in a Production is only permitted if nobody else has the projects open.

To add media from another project, drag it into the sequence or use the Source Monitor. Don’t copy from one project to the other, as this will create duplicate source clips. You can use multicams just like any other clips.

Keep your sequence projects tidy. Opening or accessing a project with every backup revisions of every sequence of every scene will take much longer than opening a project with just the most current sequences. For the best performance I recommend that you regularly move revision sequences into an “old cuts” project and close them.

Note: There isn’t a Production-wide search feature. Premiere’s search feature only works in each individual project. So keep in mind that splitting the Production into too many small projects makes it harder to find clips by searching.

Making project copies within a Production

Do not use Save As, Save a Copy, or Export Selection as Premiere Project to create new projects inside a Production folder. All these commands will create a project with the same project ID as the one you’re saving from and Premiere Pro will then throw a pop-up error about duplicate IDs in your project.

Instead, if you want to duplicate a project you can right click and choose Make a Copy directly in the Production panel, or just make a new empty project and move/copy what you want over to it.

Open projects as Read-Only

In read-only mode you can do some things, but you cannot make any changes to it. You can:

• Load sequences and clips in the Source Monitor.
• Watch sequences in the Program Monitor/timeline.
• Copy project items to an editable project.
• Export from the read-only project.

Opening a locked project from the Production panel will automatically open it as a read-only project. Editors can open any project as read-only by pressing Ctrl/Cmd when double-clicking the Project in the Production panel. They can also change the status by right-clicking the project in the Production panel and choosing Read-Only Mode. But as we all know, people can’t be trusted—so here’s a little hack you can use if you want to keep a project safe.

1. Close all your projects.
2. Change your username to something like “LOCKED” (in Preferences for Collaboration).
3. Open the project you want to lock.
4. Copy the .prlock file to some other folder.
5. Close all projects and change your username back.
6. Move the .prlock file back in the same folder as the project file.

The project will now show as locked in the Production panel, and will open as read-only for everyone. Your project should now be protected from careless editors. Until they find out they can just delete the .prlock file in question and be able to open the project again, of course. So it’s not idiot-proof, but at least it takes a more dedicated editor to start deleting files in the Production folder.

Manually make duplicate clips and generate new source clips

Normally, we want to avoid duplicate clips in a Production, but there may be occasions when you want to have duplicates. Maybe you’ve imported a slow-motion clip that was shot at 120 fps, while the camera has set the playback frame rate to 24 fps.

This gives you nice and smooth slow motion when you place the clip inside of Premiere Pro, but sometimes you may want to use the clip at normal speed. Duplicating the clip and interpreting the frame rate to 120 fps lets you have two instances of the same clip.

To make a duplicate, right-click the clip in the bin and choose Duplicate.

You can also create new source clips for turnovers and conform, so you don’t mess with the rest of the projects. Copy the sequence to a new, separate project first, then select all the clips in the timeline, and choose Generate Source Clips for Media in the Edit menu. The bin in the new project will be populated with all the necessary source clips.

Reassociating vs relinking clips in a Production

Relinking is used when a clip in a bin goes offline. Clips can get offline when an editor uses the Make Offline command, when clips are moved in Finder/Explorer, or when the name of a drive or a folder is changed. Just select the offline clips in a bin, choose Link Media, and navigate to the new folder/clip location. Make sure you do this for all your media projects.

Yes, it’s possible to do this from a timeline in your Edit project, but then you may have to do it all over again in the media project. If you use the Reveal in Project, the clip you just relinked will become offline again in the sequence, since metadata only goes from the media project to the sequence project, not the other way. This is very frustrating, so do it from a bin, and you only have to do it once.

While relinking is about the actual media files on disk, reassociation is about the relationship between the clips in your timeline and the clips in your bin. When you right-click a clip in the timeline and choose Reveal in Project, this is possible because Premiere Pro has associated that timeline clip with a source clip in the Production.

This association may break if you mess with projects on the Finder/Explorer level, changing project names, or if you’re moving media clips around in the Production, delete media projects, etc.

If you get this error message when you right-click a clip in the timeline and choose Reveal in Project, and know where the clip is, hit Yes and navigate to the project. If it can’t be found in the project, Premiere Pro will offer to search all the open projects.

If the file is not found in any of the open projects, Premiere Pro gives up, and gives you no more options.

You’ll also find the Reassociate Source Clips option in the Edit menu. You can only choose one project at a time, so if the sequence has clips from ten projects, you’ll have to do it ten times.

If you find yourself reassociating often, you might be doing something wrong. It shouldn’t be part of a regular Production workflow. But it may be helpful in major re-organizations of media within a Production. You may also want to use this if you’ve accidentally deleted a project that had some footage you’ve used in another project in the same production.

Watch the video Reassociating vs Relinking clips in a Premiere Production by Karl Soule to see this in action.

Using the Trash folder

When you delete a project from the Production panel, a Trash folder is created. Everything there is still retrievable until it’s deleted from the disk. You should definitely use the Move to Trash command to tidy up your Production occasionally.

To empty the trash, right-click on it, reveal it in Finder/Explorer, and delete it there to remove old projects permanently.

Closing a Production

You close a Production by choosing Close Production in the Production panel menu, or by clicking File->Close Production.

It’s a good idea to use File->Save All to save all the open projects before you close the Production.

How many Productions do you need?

Productions can work however you want to organize them, but here’s some general advice:

• Have fewer Productions rather than more. There’s no performance benefit to making lots of smaller Productions.
• Don’t go crazy splitting your Production into too many small media projects. There will be more clicking, searching for clips will take longer (no Production-wide search), and if you need to relink or reassociate clips, there will be more projects to handle.
  The idea is to have media projects that open fast, not to have as many as possible.
• Whenever there’s a chance that you may want to reuse material from another project, season, or episode, they should probably all be in the same Production.
• If you like to have one Production per job, but want to reuse some assets, you can keep them in an “assets” project, and import that into every new Production.
• If you need to have multiple team members working on the same sequence simultaneously, one doing color, one mixing sound, another one adding graphics, that’s not possible. But you can work on duplicates of the sequence in separate projects, and then combine them later with some copy/paste. It takes some discipline, though. Keep clean copies of the project just in case.

Converting a Production to a standard project

Make a new project in the Production and combine everything you want to be part of the new project into it. You can use Edit->Generate Source Clips to make sure all the source clips are part of the project file. Save and close the project and move the project file out of the Productions folder, and you have a standalone project.

You can also use the Export as Premiere Project feature to export only the chosen parts of a project to a standalone project outside of the Production.

Select the sequences, bins, and clips you want to be part of the new project and click File->Export->Selection as Premiere Project. You can generate new source clips when you open the new project.

If you open an exported project (or any other external project) while the Production is still open, you will get a message telling you that it’s not part of the Production.

You can’t convert a whole Production in one go, so you’ll have to do this project by project, and then import all the projects into one master project. I’m not sure why you would want or need to convert a whole Production to a standalone project, but now you know.

Archiving a Production

You can zip the whole Production folder and store it on your archive drive. Remember to also backup all the media files, as the Production folder should not contain any media files.

How Productions interact with other features

Most features in Premiere Pro will work as with standard stand-alone projects in a Production. There are some exceptions, and those who are new to Productions may be in doubt. Here’s a quick rundown of some features that work fine, and some that don’t.

Productions and Render files

Render files (previews) are shared for all projects in a Production, so a rendered effect or preview is immediately available to everyone in the team.

Productions and proxies

When working in a Production, it’s best to create your proxies before you start editing. You can use the Create Proxy method as usual. If all your team members will be using proxies, assign one person to make them and sync them to your shared storage.

Be aware that, in older versions, if you added footage to a media project in a Production, and then added the footage to a sequence in a sequences project, and then you create proxies for the footage, the sequences project wouldn’t see the proxies.

This is fixed in newer versions of Premiere Pro, but you will need to open both the sequence project and the media project with the proxies at the same time to make the proxies sync across.

If you’re using an older version and find yourself in this situation, there are two workarounds. The first of which is to offline the original media and then relink it. The proxies should then show up.

The other fix is to open both projects and move the sequence to the media project. This will sync the clips in the sequence with the attached proxies, and then you can move the sequence back to its own project.

Note: When you open a project on another system, the Enable Proxies preference gets determined by what was set on that system, and not in the project.

Productions and ingest

Ingest settings are disabled in the Production Settings dialog. To use ingest settings, close the Production and create a standalone project that’s saved outside of the Production folder. Set your desired ingest settings and import your media. After the ingest is done, save your project and close it. Open the Production and use the Add Project command to bring the ingest project into your Production.

Productions and frame matching

Hitting F to match-frame a clip into the Source Monitor will not open the source file project. It opens the source clip, and works just as in a standalone project.

Productions and source clip effects

Source clip effects are attached to the source clip (in a media project) and will ripple through the whole Production. To add or remove a source clip effect, you must be in the project where that source clip lives. Right-click on a clip in the timeline and choose Reveal in Project to open the media project and find the source clip to add, modify, or remove source clip effects. It probably goes without saying that you’ll need write access to that project.

Using the Global FX Mute command will bypass source clip effects in the active timeline.

Productions and Dynamic Link

Dynamic Link is fully compatible with Productions, but don’t store After Effects projects or Audition sessions inside the Production folder.

Productions and multicams

Multicams (multi-camera source sequences) are handled very much like ordinary source clips in a Production, and should be kept in media projects, or in their own project. To make changes to a multicam clip you must open the project where it lives and use the Open in Timeline command (or Ctrl/Cmd+double-click on the multicam in a bin).

There have been reports about multicams showing black or “media pending.” A quick fix that sometimes works is to use the Open in Timeline trick, and then do a match frame (hit F). This will force Premiere Pro to find the source clips.

Productions and graphic assets

Graphic assets are stored in the project file, and dragging a graphic asset from one project to another will create a copy in the target project. There’s no link between these clips.

Productions and text styles

Like graphic assets, text styles are saved in the actual project file. Dragging a text style from one project to another creates a copy in the target project. There’s no link between these styles, so if you redefine the style in one project, it will not affect the style in the other.

If you make changes, and want them to ripple through all projects, you’ll have to copy the style to the other projects again.

Productions and MOGRTs

When you drag a MOGRT (motion graphics template) from the Graphic Templates panel, or Essential Graphics panel as it’s still named in the 2024 version, Premiere Pro unzips the file and places a copy in the folder specified in your Scratch Disks settings. This copy will be available to all the editors in the Production.

If you want to make all the necessary MOGRTs available to everyone in the Production, I’d recommend using a Library for this.

Productions and nested sequences

Moving a sequence that contains a nested sequence to another project in the Production will copy the nested sequence to the new project. Yes, nested sequences will be copied, not moved, when you move a sequence containing a nested sequence.

This can possibly create a mess—unless you actually want a copy—so beware. It’s probably safest to delete the old instance after the copy has been made. Or just avoid moving nested sequences around too much.

If you only use nesting inside one project, you’ll have no problems. It’s when you start moving them you create chaos.

As Matt Christensen, who was on the team that developed Productions, explains it “This is intentional, and prevents Inception-like circles of nesting being formed and needing to be updated and conflicts resolved.”

A little hack from Paul Murphy is to change the nested sequence into a multicam (right-click and choose Enable Multicam). This ensures that changes made to it will update across projects. It’s not recommended by Adobe, so use this method at your own risk.

Productions and transcriptions

Transcriptions are attached to source clips. So when a clip is cut across projects in a Production, the transcript will travel with the clip into the sequence in another project.

Productions and markers

From the online help: Source clips can live in projects separate from sequences where they are used, so keep the following in mind when using markers:

• If a project with source clips and a project with a sequence containing those clips are both open in read/write mode, then adding a clip level marker to either clip instance causes the marker to appear on the other clip instance.
• If a clip marker is added in a sequence but the project containing the source clip is not open in read/write mode, the marker exists only in the sequence. The next time both projects “see” each other (meaning they are both open read/write), the marker appears on the source clip and vice versa.

Productions and labels

From the online help: When a source clip is cut into a sequence, it appears with the same label color it had in the project. From that point on, though, the label color is independent. If you change the label color in the sequence it does not change in the project, and vice versa. Multiple copies of the same clip in a sequence also do not update each other.

Productions and clip names

If Show Source Clip Name and Label is activated in the settings in the Timeline panel (the wrench icon), clip name changes in a bin will update in sequences automatically, but the change will only occur when the media project and the sequence project are open at the same time.

To rename a clip from the timeline, right-click and choose Rename. This will reveal the source clip in its media project provided that Show Source Clip Name and Label is activated.

If Show Source Clip Name and Label is not activated, the names are not linked, and there’s no need to open the media project.

Productions and media usage

Many editors find metadata fields like “Video Usage”  to be very useful for media management. These are project specific, and unfortunately do not track usage across projects in a Production.

Productions and media caching

Media cache files and the media cache database are specific to each system, so each editor will need to generate their own local media cache. Do not store media cache on the shared storage.

Productions and Lumetri Color

To apply Lumetri Color as a source clip effect you must do it in the project where the source clip lives.

Productions and auto-tagging

The Auto Tag feature in the Essential Sound panel only works in the project that has the clips in its bins. You will need to manually tag your clips if you’re working in a sequence project with clips from a media project.

Productions and Project Manager

This tool only works for one project at a time, but is compatible with Productions. Note that source clips from other projects won’t automatically generate, but you can create new ones with the Generate Source Clips for Media command before you use the Project Manager.

Shared storage

The most common form of shared storage is likely to be a NAS. The faster your shared storage is, the smoother the operation will be. If your media lives on a RAID 0 you will get the fastest read /write speed—but make sure you have a well thought-through backup solution.

As remote editing has become more popular, other solutions have emerged and evolved.

Read more about using Productions on shared storage in the online help documentation.

File syncing services

If you choose to use folder syncing services like DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or Resilio, sync two separate folders; one for the Production and another for all other assets to keep the .prlock file syncing fast.

When the Project locking files are not synced fast enough, multiple editors can possibly open the same project, and this will cause nothing but trouble.

Here’s a reminder that auto-saves may fail to save to the folder specified by the Production settings, in which case it will revert to the default for a project, which is in the same folder as the project. This will clutter your Production with auto-save folders and projects.

LucidLink

Lucid Link is a storage collaboration platform, which gives a team access to files of any size without needing to sync or download them. It appears just as a drive on your desktop, and everything you put in there, be it media files or project files is available to everyone on the team. To the user, it is a folder, It acts like a folder, and it looks like a folder.

LucidLink syncs the Project locking files with close to zero latency. It is written specifically to prioritize syncing changes as fast as possible.

To save on cloud storage (which costs money), share your Production folder, graphics, music, supporting docs, and proxies on LucidLink for real-time collaboration. Your full-resolution media can live on cloned SSDs or in a folder synced via a standard folder syncing service. Or everyone but one editor can work with just proxies, and only one editor has the full-resolution media.

They have a LucidLink panel for Premiere Pro where you can “pin” clips and manage your storage.

A small caveat: if you try to open a project file that’s still being uploaded/updated to Lucid Link you will get the warning message “Project appears to be damaged, it cannot be opened.” Wait for a few seconds, and try again.

Read more about the Premiere Pro workflow with LucidLink on their website.

Cross-platform work

If your team has a mix of macOS and Windows systems, you’ll have to relink the first time your Production is opened on a different OS than where it was created. Premiere Pro stores multiple file paths for each media clip, so you should only have to do it once.

Premiere Pro Production troubleshooting

As always on big projects: test, test, test! Try the whole workflow from import to delivery to make sure you have a solid workflow before you start building large Productions.

Constant need for relinking

Cross-platform Productions should work perfectly fine, but the very first time a macOS user opens a project made on a Windows system (and vice versa), clips need to be relinked. After this, Premiere Pro will remember both file paths, so you don’t need to do this again. To avoid trouble, it’s a good idea to give the shared storage the same drive letter on all Windows systems.

If you constantly run into the need for relinking clips when opening projects, something’s off. Try this:

• If you have a (backup) copy of the media, disconnect that disk temporarily, to make sure only one media path is visible to the system.
• Open the Production and open every media project, relinking media when asked to.
• Keep the relinked media projects open, and open every sequence project.
• When the sequence project opens and asks you to relink the media, click Cancel.
• Premiere will update the links for the sequence projects based on the media projects. 

Server time and Productions

With shared storage systems there is usually a configurable date and time setting. Always check that your editing system time matches the storage server’s time.

The easiest way to ensure this is to set the server to communicate with an NTP time server. If this is not an option, manually set the time as close as possible. Check the server time often to make sure it hasn’t drifted. More than a few minutes of time difference can lead to unexpected behavior in Premiere Pro, like regenerating peak files.

Avoid complex sequences

Even in a Production, working in long, complex timelines can make the timeline laggy. For example, if you edit your whole one-hour episode in a single timeline, you’re asking the system to keep track of maybe thousands of small clips every time you trim a cut. So give your system (and yourself) a break.

Instead, work in smaller scenes in separate, short timelines. My rough-cut sequences in documentaries are mostly from 30 seconds to 5-6 minutes long, and the system doesn’t have to struggle with juggling an excessive number of clips around. Making changes in such short sequences is easy for the system—and my brain—and it can be done a lot faster than if you need to keep track of thousands of clips.

At the start of your projects, it’s easy to nest these sequences into a new viewing/playback timeline to get the feel of the flow and the overall structure of the whole film. It’s also very fast to move scenes around when they are nested sequences.

When it gets closer to delivery, you can make “reel” sequences of around 15-20 minutes length and place the scene sequences in there without nesting. These reel sequences are what you send off to color, music and sound.

Paul Murphy shared a great tip in his Premiere Pro Masterclass Series, which was based on the Best Practices and Workflow Guide I wrote together with Adobe’s Hollywood team: When you have nested sequences in your reel sequence, and want to un-nest them, do this for every nested sequence:

1. Make sure the nest-or-not button is inactive.
2. Park over the nested sequence.
3. Hit F to do a Match Frame of the nested sequence to the source monitor.
4. Delete the nested sequence from the timeline.
5. Drag from the source monitor to the timeline.

You can un-nest all the sequences very quickly this way. What I call the “nest-or-not” button is actually named “Insert and overwrite sequences as nests or individual clips.”

The reel sequences could be nested into a master sequence to watch the whole thing, although most editors will probably prefer to make ProRes versions of the reels for this purpose.

Move backup sequences to an archive project

As explained elsewhere in this article, many users have a habit of keeping backup copies of their sequences. This is good advice, but don’t keep them in the main edit project, as each backup sequence has a small impact on performance. More RAM is needed, and opening and saving takes longer.

If you ever get the dreaded spinning ball of death when working in a Production, it’s almost always caused by cutting in sequences that are 1-2 hours long (or more) and keeping multiple back-ups of them in the same project.

Move these backup sequences to a dedicated archive project inside the Production to make your edit project healthy and snappy.

Duplicate IDs

Each project has a unique ID which the Production uses to keep track of the projects even if you move or rename them. Productions will alert you if projects in the Production have the same ID as this may cause trouble if unaddressed.

To avoid duplicate IDs, do everything project-related (Import project, Duplicate project, etc. ) from within the Productions panel, and not in Explorer/Finder. When done in the panel, Premiere Pro assigns a unique Project ID to every project.

If you ignore this advice, and make copies of projects manually at the Finder/Explorer level, you may end up with Duplicate Project IDs. This will confuse Premiere Pro, particularly in projects that contain clips. Remember, you can have projects with no media, just sequences.

As mentioned elsewhere, using Save As, Save a Copy, or Export Selection as Premiere Project to create new projects inside a Production folder will also cause duplicate IDs.

When Premiere Pro discovers duplicate IDs, you’ll get an error message telling you where to find a list of the problematic projects in a file named Duplicate Projects List.txt. Open that text document.

Using this as your guide, make sure everyone on your team saves and closes the affected project(s), and then move every project file mentioned in the text document from the Production folder to the desktop. Then add it again using the Add Project to Production feature. You’ll get a new copy of the project with a new unique ID.

Updating Premiere Pro

As you’d expect, if you try to open a Production made in 2024.x in Premiere Pro 2025.x, the Production must be converted. The original Production folder will not be affected—it simply copies the folder and does the necessary changes.

So a copy of the Production folder is made, and gets _Vxx.x.x added to its name. You can change the name of the Production by renaming the Production folder and the .prodset file to the exact same name.

Any editor still on 2024.x will not be able to open the new version of the Production, and it’s a really bad idea to work in different Productions because of version misalignment.

To avoid problems, make sure every editor in your team updates at the same time. 

Regenerating peak files

Media cache files should be kept locally on the fastest drive every editor has. If Premiere Pro generates peak files over and over upon opening or a project, it means that there’s something making Premiere Pro think the files have changed.

Typically, regenerating peak files (and .ims) is almost always caused by differences in server time. Maybe it’s not automatically changing to daylight saving time, maybe it’s just a minute or two slow or fast.

Incomplete peak files are another thing that can cause regeneration. If peak files aren’t completed before another editor picks up a project that uses the clips then the project can’t confirm they are done and will start to rebuild any that were left incomplete.

Another cause may be that you’ve deleted the media cache database. For peak files to be reused, you need the media cache database to be intact as it has the list of which peak file goes with which media file. So, if you delete the database, then the peak files are orphaned and there’s no link between them and the original media anymore. Premiere then assumes there are no peak files, and generates them again.

Reassociation trouble

When we move projects or clips around, import new projects, delete projects, etc. Premiere Pro can lose track of media files. And these files may be associated to an external project, or to a project that was deleted. Match Frame will still work, but if you try Reveal in Project, Premiere Pro will tell you that the clips are not found and asks if you want to search other open projects. If it’s still not found, you will get a new message telling you so.

This is when you need to reassociate the clips. To do this, select them in the timeline in the sequence project and click Edit->Reassociate Source Clips. You then navigate to the project where you think the clips are. You may have to do this several times if the clips are from different media projects.

Some users get stuck in a loop when trying to reassociate clips. It can be very frustrating to see the clip in the media project, so you know it’s there, but Premiere Pro still doesn’t understand that it’s the same clip.

This might be due to a metadata change, maybe triggered by updating an ASC CDL source clip effect from an ALE file (Avid Log Exchange), which can cause Premiere Pro to think it’s a different file. To force Premiere Pro to reassociate clips, have both the media project and the sequence project open, make the clips offline, update the metadata from the ALE, and relink the clips.

Another approach is to generate new source clips for the clips in the timeline and move them to the desired media project. You can then use Edit->Consolidate Duplicates to get rid of duplicates. But sometimes, if metadata has changed, that will not work. So, instead of moving the source clips, try moving the sequence to another project, then close the source clips project and reassociate clips for the sequence to the desired media project.

If reassociating clips doesn’t work, try opening the media project before you use the Reassociate Source Clips command. If nothing seems to happen when you use the command, and you have clips in a Recovered Clips bin, try deleting those recovered clips. If Premiere Pro doesn’t give you a warning about the clips being used in a sequence, the reassociation worked.

A more elaborate approach, if you get into reassociation trouble, is to open the Production with no media files available (move or rename the media folder or, if the media is on an external disk, remove the disk). Offline every media file and detach all proxies. Save and close. When you reopen the Production with the media files available, open the media projects first and relink the files. Keep the media projects open and then open the sequence projects, and finally Save All.

Another elaborate approach is to make a new Production and import the projects into it, one-by-one. You must start with the media projects, then import your sequence projects, and Save All. With this method, there’s no offline/relink, no new source clips, just a manual rebuild of the structure in the Production, including the folder structure. If you start from a Production template, the folder structure should already be close to what you need, and you can just delete any existing projects from the template before you start importing.

Accidentally deleted footage

If footage is accidentally deleted from a media project, it doesn’t disappear from the timeline in sequence projects in the Production. But if you use the Reveal in Project command, Premiere Pro will not find it because the original source clip is no longer in the Production.

Putting the files back into the media project, or offline + relink doesn’t help, and trying multiple times can cause duplicate or orphaned clips, which you will not be able to reassociate.

The solution is to select all the clips in the timeline and choose Edit > Generate Source Clips for Media. This will create new source clips in the same project as the sequence, which you can then move freely to any other project in the Production and retain the normal linking across projects.

In a large Production, re-organizing after generating Source Clips can take quite some time, so don’t remove media projects from Trash until you’re absolutely sure you don’t need it. 

Clips appear black in a Timeline in a Production

If the clips seem to have gotten a black label color, the solution/workaround is to relabel the clips to a different color, and then relabel them again to the color you want.

Thanks

I want to thank Max Hagelstam from Adobe Sweden for working on a small Premiere Pro Production with me so I could do some screengrabs. Also, Karl Lee Soule, Matt Christensen, and Paul Murphy from Adobe for their contributions and help.