How to Edit with Multiple People - HELP
 

Since I'm editing on Premiere, I thought it best to post this question here, however, it might not be specific to Premiere.

We used to be a small, 1-guy editing operation. But now we are huge (joke) and have 3 guys doing editing on an ongoing kids program.

I need some help with how to effectively edit the same program with 3 different people editing.

I assume that it's impossible for all 3 editors to edit the same project file simultaneously, right? That would be ideal as long as each person is working on a different scene, but even then, I'm sure it would introduce all kinds of problems.

So I'm left pondering the best way to edit one large program (1-hour in final length) between multiple people. The best method I've come up with to this point is to split my project up into 5 individual PP projects broken down by general scene categories.

That way each person can work on the "same" project/episode, but yet be working off of separate files, thus avoiding syncing problems. Then after everyone's done with their edits, we stitch all the subprojects into one large master project and hit the export button.

But this only seems like a bandaide to our situation, especially if we bring on a couple more editors in the future.

Any suggestions on working on the same project/episode at the same time between multiple people?

Currently you can't concurrently share an individual Premiere Project between multiple users. You can share the source assets and temp files on a network or SAN, but each user must be in a diffferent project to avoid overwriting each other's work. The method of breaking the work up into segments to the logical approach to sharing the work. We break our feature films into Reels, and open 6 Reels across 4 workstations. You just have to be careful that two don't open one at the same time, and overwrite each others changes as they save.
Avid with Unity allows multiple editors to access the same project concurrently, but not the same bin or sequence. Hopefully someday we will see similar functionality from Premiere, but until then, you are going to need to break up the work into subprojects, and keep careful track of versions and such.

There is a simple solution called shifting, but I guess the one with the nightshift will not be amused ;-)

Break the show up into different parts to work on and combine them later.

I've edited a multimediashow together, but separated with another editor. But it was easy to divide the different parts, because the music was already finished.

Actually, there are SANs capable of this for Premiere Pro as well as sharing bins in Avid (I know EditShare can do this for Avid). However, these SANs generally start at $15,000.

Look here:
Studio Network Solutions - Audio/Video SAN Shared Storage
Apace Systems Corporation - Specialized Network Storage and Collaboration