This is an unexpected little Adobe Premiere Pro related news drop that comes right out of the Sundance Film Festival. Coming soon to Premiere Pro will be Productions, a new workflow “for managing projects, sharing assets between them, and keeping everything organized, whether you’re working on your own or collaborating with a team.”

If that sounds a lot like Team Projects, which currently exists in Premiere Pro, then you’re thinking the same thing that I did … that sounds a lot like Team Projects. And there are also Shared Projects so we don’t want to forget about that. But take a look at the video below and you’ll see it seems to take Team Projects to the next level even though Team Projects will still exist.

One important addition that I see is the addition of a new Production panel. Creating a Production looks a lot like a workspace of sorts where you get a new folder on disk to store all of your Adobe Premiere Pro projects. It’s unclear if you’d store media in that on-disk Production folder but from the looks of the demo below it appears that a Production folder is a place to track and manage the many Adobe Premiere Pro project files you’d create across a large project like a television or feature film.

The layout of a production in the Production panel mirrors what is on disk in the production’s folder and organizational changes in one will mirror in the other. You may also notice the red locks in the image above provided by Adobe. We can see that the locked in red projects on the left are open on the right as you can see the .prlock file next to them. That would be Premiere project locking which was introduced a few versions ago. It’s pointed out that Productions was designed to work with shared storage so “multiple editors can work on different projects in the same Production.” If a project is locked others in the Production can open it in read-only mode.

I’m also intrigued by this mention: “All projects in a Production share the same settings, including scratch disks.” Sharing those preferences will go a long way to making collaboration easier but I would ask what about the media cache? Once we get to a place where Premiere can share media cache locations and cache files easily and properly that will be the next step in collaboration. From what I can see just be reading the press release and watching the video is that this is a way to manage Premiere project files and little else. This is a very important thing for collaboration that’s for sure but you’ll probably still need to be very diligent with media management which is very important to working with Premiere overall. Perhaps there is more to Productions than what we see here and it almost brings up more questions for me than answers.

This will be another step closer to Avid Media Composer style collaboration but since Premiere is project-based Avid still has the advantage of being able to selectively share things within a project by sharing and/or locking single bins, not the entire project. What I’m seeing above literally looks like they are using single Premiere project files as bins. I’m not so sure about that but that’s how the architecture of Premiere works. It feels like Adobe is really feeling their way into full collaboration as we’ve been seeing piecemeal advancements in this direction for the last few years. More will be learned as Premiere Productions are introduced into the world so we’ll learn more when we can use it!

The full press release is below.

A discussion on Twitter has brought a bit more light on Productions. Have a read at some of the thoughts below.

Hey Scott I love your writeup on Productions, thank you!

To clear two things up:
– Productions are the final evolution of Shared Projects, so it replaces that workflow
– You mention it looks like using .prproj like .avb files. If you want to work that way it absolutely does 🙂

— Matt Christensen (@_mchristensen) January 23, 2020

While it’s true the locking/collaboration aspect is designed for shared storage, Productions themselves can live anywhere and be your new “project”.

Remote teams could start with the same base Production and share .prproj back and forth like bins!

— Matt Christensen (@_mchristensen) January 23, 2020

Productions replace Shared Projects and is more or less the final evolution of it.

Want to collaborate where the source of truth is in the cloud? Team Projects.

Want to collaborate where the source of truth is on disk (whether local or shared storage)? Productions.

— Matt Christensen (@_mchristensen) January 23, 2020

If I may be so bold it’s more like a .prproj inside a Production is a more capable version of an .avb in an Avid Project, for example.

All of the same benefits apply (sending a .prproj between Productions, for example) but it can have folders and all the stuff a .prproj can have

— Matt Christensen (@_mchristensen) January 23, 2020

Organized, and synchronized

Media referencing across projects means you can re-use assets within your Production without creating duplicates. This helps you keep individual projects light and fast.

The new Production panel in Premiere Pro provides a command center for managing multi-project workflows. Any projects you add to the Productions folder become part of the Production. Whether you are working on macOS or Windows, any changes you make on disk are reflected in Premiere Pro; changes in Premiere Pro are applied on disk. Productions keep everything in sync.

Designed for collaboration

Using shared local storage, multiple editors can work on different projects in the same Production. Project Locking ensures that no one overwrites your work: your colleagues can still access your project, and copy content from it, but they can’t make changes until you’ve completed your edit.

All projects in a Production share the same settings, including scratch disks. This means that preview files rendered by one editor are available for all editors who use that project, ensuring smooth playback and time- saving for the whole team.

The Production panel gives you a bird’s eye view of all your projects and shows you who is working on what so you and your team can track your progress.

Security: you control your media

With Productions, you have full control of your content. Your projects and assets can live entirely on your local storage. Nothing is on the cloud unless you put it there. If needed, you can do all your work without an internet connection.

Modern tools for modern filmmakers