How to Collect Files and Easily Share Projects in Adobe Premiere Pro CC

When working on a project, your footage and assets often come from many different locations on your hard drive. Some clips are on your desktop, some are in a downloads folder, some are on an external drive. This works fine when you are the only person editing on one machine. But the moment you need to move the project to a different computer, share it with a collaborator, or archive it for later, you have a problem. Premiere Pro references file paths, and if those paths don’t exist on the other machine, everything shows up as “Media Offline.”

The solution is the Project Manager. It gathers every piece of media your project uses and copies it all into one folder alongside the project file. That folder is completely self-contained and can be moved to any computer without missing files.

Today I am going to show you how to do this in both Premiere Pro and After Effects.

How to Collect Files in Premiere Pro

1. Go to File > Project Manager.
2. At the top, select all the sequences you want to include. Check the boxes next to each one.
3. Under Resulting Project, select Collect Files and Copy to New Location. This copies all media files into a single folder. The alternative option (Consolidate and Transcode) re-encodes the footage, which takes longer and is usually unnecessary.
4. Under Options:
   • Uncheck Exclude Unused Clips if there is footage in your project that has not been placed in a sequence yet but you still want to keep. If you only want the media that is actually used in your sequences, leave it checked.
   • Leave the other options at their defaults.
5. Under Destination Path, click Browse and select where you want the collected project saved. Creating a new folder for this is a good idea.
6. If you want to check the total size before committing, click Calculate. The estimated size will appear under Resulting Project Size.
7. Click OK. Premiere Pro will copy all media files, project files, and metadata into the destination folder.

The resulting folder contains everything Premiere Pro needs to open the project on any computer. You can copy it to an external drive, upload it to cloud storage, or hand it off to another editor.

How to Collect Files in After Effects

The process in After Effects is even simpler.

1. Go to File > Dependencies > Collect Files.
2. If prompted, save your project first.
3. Choose a location on your hard drive and click Save.
4. After Effects will create a folder with a copy of the project file and all associated media.

Tips

• Always collect files before archiving. If you archive just the project file without the media, it will be useless when you try to open it later.
• Use “Exclude Unused Clips” to save space. If you imported 200 clips but only used 50, checking this option can dramatically reduce the collected project size.
• Collect before switching computers. Whether you are moving to a new machine, sending to a client, or handing off to another editor, the Project Manager ensures nothing gets left behind.
• Keep your source media organized from the start. If you tag your footage and keep it in a consistent folder structure, the collection process is faster and the resulting folder is cleaner.
• Test the collected project. After collecting, open the project from the new location to verify everything links correctly. It is better to catch a missing file now than after you have deleted the originals.

That is how you collect files and share projects in Premiere Pro and After Effects. The Project Manager takes about 30 seconds to run and saves you from the frustration of missing media down the road.