Most edits end the same way. You export, watch the progress bar, find the file, drag it into the review site, wait for the upload, copy the link and write the email. On a day with four deliveries, a good part of the afternoon goes to watching bars fill up.
Two folders can take most of that off your hands. One belongs to Adobe Media Encoder (AME) and turns whatever lands in it into a review copy. The other is watched by an upload app that sends the copy up for review.
The handoff between them is where things tend to go wrong.
In short
- A Media Encoder watch folder encodes whatever lands in it, and an upload app’s watch folder sends the finished file up for review.
- Turn on Auto-Encode Watch Folders, keep Media Encoder open and drop files, not folders.
- Point the upload app at Media Encoder’s Output folder, so the review copy goes up and the master stays.
- Name the master with the task code, because the review copy inherits its name.
- For a five-minute cut, an H.264 review copy uploads in about 2 minutes and a ProRes master in about 22.
Two kinds of watch folder
A Media Encoder watch folder is an encoding rule attached to a folder. You drop a file in and AME encodes it with the presets you assigned, without anyone touching the queue. What happens to the result afterwards is up to you.
A watch folder in an upload app encodes nothing. It waits for a finished file to show up and sends it somewhere, usually the review platform where the client will watch it. Chain the two and an export from Premiere becomes a new version for the client without anyone dragging files.
How to set up a watch folder in Media Encoder
- Create the folder in Finder first, with a name that says what comes out of it, like
_review-h264. - Open Media Encoder, go to the Watch Folders panel, click the plus button and choose that folder.
- AME assigns an H.264 preset by default. Click its name to pick another. For review copies, H.264 Match Source - High bitrate is a reasonable start, since it keeps the master’s frame size and frame rate.
- If the same drop should also produce a vertical version, add another output with its own preset.
- In the Queue panel, check Auto-Encode Watch Folders. Without it, files sit in the folder and nothing gets encoded.
By default AME writes the encoded files to an Output folder it creates inside the watch folder. Click the blue output path next to the preset to send them somewhere else.
The file you dropped in moves too, into a Source folder, in a subfolder named with the date and time, so it doesn’t get encoded twice. If that file is linked from somewhere else, like a Premiere project, drop a copy or an alias instead, as Larry Jordan suggests.
Media Encoder also has to stay open. Quit it and nothing gets watched.
Where Media Encoder watch folders trip people up
- AME only looks at files sitting directly in the watched folder. Drop in a folder full of clips and, as people keep reporting on Adobe’s forums, the subfolder isn’t scanned. Drag the files themselves.
- A shared folder on the server works too, and lets the whole team drop files for encoding. One machine still has to run Media Encoder and do all of it, and Larry Jordan’s guide to network watch folders sets a computer aside for the job.
- Don’t point the output back at the watch folder. AME treats any video file in there as new work and would encode its own render again.
- Keep one folder per deliverable. If review copies and masters come out of the same folder, every drop makes both.
- A file that sits for a few seconds before anything happens is normal. Encoding starts after the file has finished arriving, with a short delay.
The second folder: getting the render in front of the client
Uploading from a folder sounds simple until the first broken file goes out. Encoders write the file while they work, and an MP4 or MOV only gets its index at the very end.
An app that uploads a file as soon as it appears sends a video that won’t play, or stops halfway. A careful one waits until the file stops growing and the encoder lets go of it, then checks that it’s complete.
The app also has to know where the file belongs, and that’s in the file name or nowhere. This is where a naming convention with a code at the start pays off.
The chain that holds up goes like this:
- Premiere exports the master into the Media Encoder watch folder.
- AME writes the H.264 review copy to its Output folder.
- The upload app watches that Output folder.
If it watched the folder above, it would upload the master you dropped in for encoding. To skip the first folder, send the export from Premiere to Media Encoder’s queue with the output path set to the folder the upload app watches.
Sending it to the client is its own step, covered in how to share a video for client review.
What breaks the chain
Half-written renders are the classic. If your upload app grabs files on sight, a render that’s still running or that crashed halfway goes up broken. Test it once with a long export.
Next come file names. AME names the review copy after the file you dropped in, so the master needs the right name. ACM_014_teaser_v03.mov goes in and ACM_014_teaser_v03.mp4 comes out.
Sequence 01.mov becomes Sequence 01.mp4, and nothing downstream can tell which job that is.
Then there’s the master going up in place of the review copy. Apple’s ProRes white paper puts ProRes 422 HQ at about 220 Mb/s for 1080p at 29.97 fps. For a five-minute cut, that looks like this:
| File | Bitrate | Size | Upload at 50 Mb/s |
|---|---|---|---|
| ProRes 422 HQ master | about 220 Mb/s | about 8.3 GB | about 22 min |
| H.264 review copy | 20 Mb/s | 750 MB | about 2 min |
Those times assume the whole 50 Mb/s goes to the upload, which it rarely does. The client watching in a browser has no use for ProRes anyway.
A slow uplink makes it worse, because the longer an upload runs, the more chances it has to hit a dropped connection or a Mac going to sleep. An uploader that sends the file in parts can retry the failed part and keep the rest.
How this works in RecReview
The RecReview app for Mac has watch folders, in the Watch Folders tab of Settings. There’s no Windows version yet.
A folder you add belongs to the workspace you’re in, and for each one you can set a default client and project for new tasks, choose between stacking files as versions or always creating a new task, and turn AI Review on or off.
The app only looks at video files directly inside the folder, not in subfolders, so point it at Media Encoder’s Output folder.
It waits until the file has stopped growing for 15 seconds and no other app has it open, which can mean up to 24 hours for a paused render. MP4 and MOV files are then checked, and an export that died halfway is skipped and marked as incomplete.
Files go up one at a time, in parts, with retries, and the Mac doesn’t sleep while one is uploading. You get a notification when an upload finishes or fails.
The same file never goes up twice, and renders that finished while the app was closed upload when it opens again, so turn on Open at login.
In the automatic mode, a file whose name starts with a task code like MSH_001 becomes the next version of that task, as long as the prefix is one of your clients’ codes. Versions are numbered in the order they arrive, so the v03 in the name is for people.
A file with no code is matched by its name, and becomes a new task named after the file if nothing matches. While a file is waiting or uploading, you can pick its task by hand in the app’s upload list.
Plans have a per-file limit of 2 GB on Creator, 5 GB on Pro and 10 GB on Studio, so that 8 GB master only fits on Studio, while its review copy fits on any plan.
In Premiere, Send new version in the Premiere panel exports the sequence as H.264, names it with the task code and the next version number, and saves it to a folder the Mac app watches once you allow it the first time.
