A team project consists of metadata and media references that are stored in a database hosted in Adobe’s Creative Cloud. The media used in your team project can be stored in various locations such as a network shared storage, a local hard drive, or via cloud storage synced to your desktop such as Creative Cloud folders, Dropbox, or OneDrive.

To import a media into a team project:

Step 1: Decide where to share your media:

We recommend choosing a shared location that is accessible by all team members. Cloud based file sharing options, including Creative Cloud, are easy to access remotely. Access to shared storage such as a NAS works if everyone can reach it remotely, note that VPN is usually slow for media access. Finally, if there is no change in the media set, an external drive with a copy of the media sent to all collaborators also works.

Step 2: Import media from that agreed upon shared storage:

When adding new media to your project, it is best to copy that media to the shared storage location first, then import that media into Premiere Pro or After Effects to edit. This makes it easier for external users to map their view of the media to the shared location and have access to everything. You can add subfolders to organize media, but it is preferable to have all the media for this project is in the same folder. Keeping the same folder hierarchy in all the shared locations helps Premiere Pro and After Effects automatically, saving you time.

Manage media

Step 3: Each team member maps their specific location of this shared media to this project:

Each team member might have their media in different folders, so Team Projects lets each user create a Media Mapping - a user specific path to that media folder. This allows one user to import media into a project using their user specific media path, but other team members interpret that media location using their specific media path.

The best way to create a media mapping is to map the root of the shared folder to the root of the project's media. Creating the Media Mapping on the root folder helps Team Projects find all individual media files automatically. If there is more than one top level shared folder (maybe one folder of artwork or music shared amongst many projects), just create a Media Mapping for that folder as well, assuming one does not already exist.

Media used in your team project remain on your local machine. Share assets with your team using Creative Cloud assets, network shared storage, or an alternate cloud storage option. If you ever experience any missing media, choose Edit > Team Project > Media Management from the main menu to access the media management tool.

Each collaborator on a team project must have access to their copies of media used in the team project, or the media appears offline. However, collaborators can access media in different locations, as team projects allows for user-specific media mapping. It helps the co-located users using media in network shared storage to collaborate with remote users who access media (likely proxy files) in a different (often cloud-synced) storage location.

Relink media in Premiere Pro with Team Projects

If you are working on a Team Project in Premiere Pro, you can use the same relink workflow (Link Media) in Team Projects as you do in stand-alone Premiere Pro. This workflow is a local-only change, and is not treated as an edit to the project, thus eliminating the need to share it with other collaborators.

In the backgorund, it works similar to the Media Management dialog as Team Projects generate the necessary media mapping, but without impacting media paths in machines of other collaborators. And since the relink is local only, it prevents one collaborator from accidentally changing the media mappings for the other collaborators.