PluralEyes

Using a PluralEyes Project

This page discusses how to create and manage your PluralEyes projects and media locations.

Create a new project

To start a new project in which you will import media files, simply open the PluralEyes application, then drag and drop your media folders or files onto the blank PluralEyes window and it will start importing and analyzing the media files. To start a new project using a file exported from an NLE, see Importing Projects from NLEs . Note that you can only have one project open at a time in PluralEyes .

What a project looks at

Each PluralEyes project references a set of media files that you import into it. The automatic synchronization process will look at all the media files in a project, and attempt to synchronize them all together. PluralEyes does not move or change your original media files. Instead, it creates temporary files . You will need to import media files from a location for which you have read/write privileges. Temporary files can be quite large, roughly 10% of the size of your audio files and 1% of the size of your video files. Therefore, you should have plenty of free space on the disk you are writing temporary files to. You can change this directory in the PluralEyes preferences. Also, be sure you're adding only the media that needs to be synced from your project folders to avoid errors. Attempting to add still images, for example, will result in a pop up warning in PluralEyes.

Save your PluralEyes project

To save a PluralEyes project, click File> Save Project. Saving projects in PluralEyes is not strictly necessary, but doing so has some advantages.

• It lets you give the project a meaningful name, which will become part of the name used for the files and folders that you export from PluralEyes .
• It gives you a small project file containing references to your media files and information about settings and any synchronization that has been done. This lets you share your work with another user, or come back to your work after shutting down your computer.

The project file is saved with the extension “.p4p” on both OS X and Windows. This file format references your media files, and includes information about project settings and synchronization attempts. Project files are small, typically less than 100 KB.

Store and share your projects

Storing. PluralEyes is a non-destructive editor, similar to editing applications like Premiere Pro. The PluralEyes timeline points to the media clips. The project file and the PluralEyes “synctemp” folder can be saved anywhere, as long as they can access the original media clips. After exporting from PluralEyes, you can safely move the project files to a different location. Sharing. If you send a PluralEyes file to someone who uses a different computer, that person can use it as long as the project can see the source media files. The user must also have read/write permission for the location of the media files, so PluralEyes can generate temporary files to that location.