Where does autoEdit save transcription/PaperEdit sessions?

[jondrometa86]

We're trying to work with AutoEdit on multiple Mac computers and can't figure out how to send all work done in the app to another machine for a separate editor to build paperedits from transcribed videos.

Any insights on how to use AutoEdit across multiple computers?

[pietrop]

Hi @jondrometa86,
At the moment autoEdit is saving things in the user data folder which on a mac is in ~/Library/Application \Support/autoEdit2.

I thought of making it possible to sync that over dropbox or something, but I think that would be prompt to errors. For multi user collaboration it be necessary to sync over some kind of web app that helps with the synching, and manages potential merge conflicts etc.. to enable proper multi user collaboration.

There might be ways to architect that thinking it through a bit more, autoEdit is already setup so that the "front end" could be reused to be the front end for a web app.

I gave a talk about this idea of modular architecture more recently, if it's of interest

What is your main use case tho? transcriptions and/or paper-editing? Let me know there might be workarounds for specific use cases.

[jondrometa86]

@pietrop,
Thanks for the quick response! Your current solution for collaboration should work for us. Thank you for pointing out where the data folder is located.

To your question; my company is building case studies for clients from multiple video interviews.

The ideal workflow is:

1. Transcribing each interview
2. Building a paperEdit out of all the interviews.
3. Importing into Premiere Pro CC for refining/publishing

Your prPro Panel is exactly what we've needed.
One bug I noticed: prPro 2019 throws a "select a file" error when clicking submit.
In prPro 2018, this is not an issue.

Unrelated-- THANK YOU for creating this project! I've literally been tinkering with developing this sort of tool for about a year now (learning to code in the process). autoEdit was the solution my team and I have been dreaming of.

[jondrometa86]

update on the "prPro 2019 error"
Probably just user-error.... restarting my editing machine solved the issue. :)
The Premiere Pro panel now works fine on both 2018 and 2019 versions of Premiere Pro CC.

Thanks again, @pietrop! autoEdit is brilliant. I look forward to contributing to this project.

[pietrop]

awesome, @jondrometa86 are you going to try with dropbox sync across multiple macs?

I think there's a restriction on using 12.1 as mentioned in the user manual one of the Adobe CEP functions is only compatible with latest adobe version, more on this in the docs

at which point of those 3 steps is the collaboration across macs necessary? if it is only on point 3 you could just pass an edl between computers, eg via email or dropbox. See here for more on EDL

[jondrometa86]

For now, I was thinking of running the transcriptions in autoEdit and cleaning them up locally.
Then, manually copying autoEdit's local data from ~/Library/Application \Support/autoEdit2 and sending it to my team member to create paper edits + add to sequence in premiere pro.
They would place the local data in the same location on their machine and launch autoEdit from there.

Tedious workflow for now... but as you said, it will avoid data conflicts.

This week, I'll try the dropbox method on a test project (saving autoEdit data to a shared folder on Dropbox) and see how it behaves with multiple users sharing the same data.

Potential sync solution:

Premiere Pro CC has a nice feature for "locking" a prPro project when an editor opens it.
The software does this by creating a .prlock file when the user opens it.

This .prlock file is deleted when the project is closed.

My team and I share a Dropbox for all client projects.
So long as everyone is online while editing... this mechanism prevents multiple editors from overwriting each other's work. They can still open the project, but it's rendered "locked/read-only" to everyone but the first person who opened it.

Not sure if there's a mechanism or open source library available to try out in autoEdit... but might be worth exploring.