Premiere Pro media linking with illegal filenames

Question

I was working on a video project with some classmates and after our class ended I asked our editor if I could have the footage. She everso-nicely renamed the files so they are human-readable, however, included / in many of the files. For example, scene2_shot17_take1-OTS/chairs.MP4 is the name of a file. Mac, for some reason, is able to read the /. Windows, however, reads it as scene2_shot17_take1-OTSchairs.MP4.

For Premiere Pro, when I load up the project, it asks me to locate all of the files. It says the last path was Path/to/file/scene2_shot17_take1-OTS:chairs.MP4. So instead of replacing / with , it replaces it with : which is also an illegal character to have in filenames!

I've used Advanced Renamer to rename all the files that contain  to _. My only question now is how to inform premier pro that I have made that change. I have almost 100 files that had / in them and I would not like to have to manually link them all. Thanks

Answer 1

After some STRUGGLE. I found this worked (strap in for a ride). Here's the step-by-step:

1. (Since I was in a group) have your project open and go to Edit>Team Project>Convert Team Project to Project.

2. The Premiere Pro project file (.prproj) is actually a compressed XML file. Exit Premiere Pro and then rename your project file from YourProject.prproj to YourProject.zip

3. unzip the file. It wouldn't work on my computer unless I used 7-zip to unzip it.

4. open the file titled YourProject in a text editor (I used VSCode)

5. Access the find and replace functionality (here's where it gets complicated)

6. Some text/code editors have an option like regular expression or use regex. You will need to enable this.

7. input ([a-zA-Z0-9\s_\\.-]+):([a-zA-Z0-9\s_\\.-]+)\.MP4 for the find field. this finds any .MP4 file that contains :

8. input $1_$2.MP4 in the replace field. $1 is all the text before : and $2 is all the text after up until .MP4.

9. Hit replace all and save the file- make sure to add the .prproj extension to it.

10. Load it up!

remember to always make a backup of your project file as I've only tested this a little bit. It worked for me!