premconverter

What is it?

If you've been using Premiere for a while, especially in a corporate environment, you'll know about the pain of upgrading. At The Guardian, we closely manage all our project files and this means that simply having the users "save as" a project is not an option, because the project file can then easily get lost and they then lose their work.

Fortunately, (at least when upgrading from 2017 to 2019) the underlying data structures within the file are the same and we can simply update the version identifier within the file to allow the later Premiere to open a project file that was saved in the earlier version.

This app automates that process, allowing you to efficiently batch-convert many project files from the older to the newer version.

What does it run on?

The app runs from the commandline on any platform that Go supports - including MS Windows, Mac and Linux in 32 and 64 bit flavours.

DISCLAIMER

This process involves messing with the internal content of the project file, which Adobe specifically do not recommend. Neither I as the author nor Adobe can be held responsible if this operation corrupts your project file. ALWAYS, always, ALWAYS have a backup before messing with your project file in this way; if anything goes wrong then you can always get back to where you started. I would recommend testing the converted file throughly in Premiere, just because it opens does not mean that there is not some kind of subtle incompatibility hiding in there that may crash your Premiere.

I repeat: make sure your project file is backed up before messing around with it.

How do I build it?

Step 1 - ensure you have Go v1.11 or later installed. Also ensure you have GNU make installed (Mac and Linux should have this already)

Step 2 - clone this repo and run make test && make from the root of the checkout

Step 3 - this should run all the tests and output the compiled program to the bin/ directory. Choose the appropriate one for your operating system

Step 4 - copy the relevant binary to somewhere on your PATH, e.g. cp bin/premconverter.macos /usr/local/bin for Mac.

But I'm on Windows!

Ah. Well, unfortunately, I don't do any development on Windows so I'm not best-placed to help. My recommendation would be to install Docker, then run (from a command prompt):

$ docker run --rm -it -v {path-to-checkout}:/usr/src golang:1.12-stretch
[wait for Docker to download the image and put you to a prompt....]
root@e1f44704e2dc:/go# cd /usr/src
root@e1f44704e2dc:/usr/src# make test && make
cd ./src; go test ./...
?   	github.com/fredex42/premconverter	[no test files]
ok  	github.com/fredex42/premconverter/reader	0.004s
cd ./src; GOOS=darwin go build -o ../bin/premconverter.macos
cd ./src; GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -o ../bin/premconverter.linux64
cd ./src; GOOS=linux GOARCH=386 go build -o ../bin/premconverter.linux32
cd ./src; GOOS=windows go build -o ../bin/premconverter.exe
root@e1f44704e2dc:/usr/src# exit

This allows you to fairly simply have a working Linux environment to perform the build. Alternatively, of course, you can just follow the instructions to set up Go on Windows - I have not done this myself, so I can't presume to offer any advice on it though.

Do I HAVE to build it myself?

Right now, I'm afraid yes - I am in the process of setting up an automated build and when that is done will update this doc with details of where you can download precompiled binaries from.

Do I need Go installed to run it?

No! Just the plain, simple, executable is enough. That's right - no libraries, no runtimes, no nothing. Just a single executable. Copy and play.

How do I run it?

With that part out of the way, now comes the simple part:

$ premconverter.macos --help
premconverter version DEV by Andy Gallagher. See https://github.com/fredex42/premconverter for details.

Usage of ./bin/premconverter.macos:
  -allow-overwrite
    	whether we are allowed to overwrite existing files in the output directory or not
  -concurrency int
    	how many projects to process at once when in batch mode (default 3)
  -input string
    	a single prproj file to process
  -list string
    	a newline-delimited list of input files to process
  -output string
    	a single prproj file to output, or a directory for output if using a batch list
    	
$ premconverter.macos -input /path/to/my/current.prproj -output /path/to/my/updated.prproj

The last line will update current.prproj into a new file at updated.prproj, leaving current.prproj unmodified. It can take a while if the project file is large.

You can then attempt to open updated.prproj in Premiere 2019.

Wait, you said something about batching?

If you have a bunch of files to convert, you can do it like this:

$ find /path/to/your/projects -iname \*.prproj > ~/myfiles.lst
$ mkdir -p /path/to/upgraded/projects
$ premconverter.macos -list ~/myfiles.lst -output  /path/to/upgraded/projects

This will convert every project mentioned in the myfiles.lst file and put the updated version into /path/to/upgraded/projects. Nothing in /path/to/upgraded/projects will get overwritten by default; specify -allow-overwrite on the commandline to allow this.

By default, 3 conversions will be carried out at once to make use of multiple cores available on the machine. You can specify -concurrency {n} on the commandline to increase or decrease this depending on your needs.

This is all very well, but I have tens of thousands of projects to copy

Have a look at kube/README.md, which contains details of how to set up a large-scale run on a Kubernetes cluster