Is there a way to export a list of all files used in an Adobe Premiere Pro project?

Question

I have a project which uses a lot of files that are placed on different hard drives. Is there an easy way to get all used files?

Answer 1

Just in case, you want to copy the files afterwards somewhere: You could convert the project to a team project, if not already and use Edit->Team Project...-> Media Management to copy all files to a shared storage.

But for a plain list you best go to File->Export -> Final Cut Pro XML. Make sure you haven't selected any clip in Media browser, because then it'll only export information for that one. With nothing selected, a copy of the whole project file should be converted to the XML file. The benefit: unlike Adobe's own format, this XML is human readable and it contains all file paths. Just search the document for <pathurl> and you find the file path there but with special characters escaped (meaning those are replaced, e.g. the space character is expressed by %20).

One way to get a clean list, is to use a text editor with RegEx (=regular expressions) support. Sometimes usage of regular expressions varies a tiny bit with different tools. The following has been tested with the text editor Sublime for Windows, press Ctrl+H for the replacment dialogue and make sure to click the button with .* as text. In case you use macOS, I am sure there are similar alternatives available or pre-installed.

1. use ^((?!<pathurl>.*</pathurl>).)*$ and replace it with nothing to get rid of everything but the pathurl parts
2. replace \s with nothing to remove the tons empty lines.
3. replace <pathurl>file://localhost/ with nothing
4. replace </pathurl> with a line break \n.

Finally copy everything into a tool like URL Encode Decode (and press decode URL) to get a list with those %20 and similar escapings removed. You could replace them one by one in text editor, but depending how many different escapings there are, this would be too much work. Oh, and finally replace the / with \ if you use Windows (or \\ in RegEx syntax).

Of course, if you do it more than once, it might help to write a script or a program, that extracts those XML parts. However, this would be well beyond the scope of this question. Alternatively you could look for XML tools, which might make things much more convenient for you, but I'm not aware of a good tool that does this job better than a text editor with RegEx support.