Pure Collect

How it protects your project

Pure Collect copies your media, then saves a copy of the project and does all relinking on that copy. Nothing is written back to the project you were working in. If a collection fails halfway, the original on disk is byte-for-byte unchanged.

Requirements

Quick start

1. Click the sequence you want to collect. Pure Collect always works from the active timeline.

2. Open the panel. Window → Extensions → Pure Collect

3. Choose Folder & Name… Pick a parent folder. The output is named after your project unless you change it.

4. Press Scan. Nothing is copied yet. You get a count per category, a total size, and a warning listing any offline media — reconnect those before collecting, because offline clips cannot be collected.

5. Press Collect. Progress is reported byte by byte. When it finishes you get a summary of files copied, items relinked, and After Effects links collected.

Open the new .prproj in the collect folder. Every clip should be online.

Collecting into a folder you’ve used before. Use Update Existing Collection… instead. Files already present at the same size are skipped, so a second pass over a large project takes minutes rather than hours.

Options

Sequences to keep. With Project diet on, every sequence is listed with a checkbox. Check as many as you like — the media for all of them is collected, so nothing you keep goes offline. The active sequence is checked for you.

What you get

A folder is created only when something belongs in it. You will not get a tree of empty directories.

Your bins come with you

Footage organised by shoot day or location keeps that structure on disk instead of being flattened into one pile:

Camera card folders — M4ROOT, CLIP, DCIM, PRIVATE, BDMV, AVCHD, BPAV, XDROOT — are stripped out, since they mean nothing to an editor.

About LUTs

Premiere embeds Lumetri LUT data into the project itself, so a collected project grades correctly without the original .cube files. Pure Collect copies them into LUT/ anyway — not because the project needs them, but so the next editor can reuse or adjust the originals.

After Effects Dynamic Link

This is the part most collection tools get wrong, so it is worth understanding.

With Collect AE Dynamic Links on, Pure Collect detects every linked .aep your timeline uses and, for each one, launches a separate background After Effects instance that opens the project, copies the footage inside it, relinks it, and saves a new .aep into 04_AE/.

04_AE/
├── [Comp].aep            new project, fully relinked
└── [Comp]_Footage/       that comp's media, in its own isolated folder
    ├── 01_Footage/  02_Audio/  03_Graphics/

04_AE/
├── [Comp].aep            new project, fully relinked
└── [Comp]_Footage/       that comp's media, in its own isolated folder
    ├── 01_Footage/  02_Audio/  03_Graphics/

Every comp gets its own folder. This matters: when everything is poured into one shared folder, two different files with the same name collide and one of them gets relinked to the wrong media — silently, with no error. Isolating each comp makes that impossible.

What to expect while it runs

• No After Effects window opens. Collection runs headless. If a project needs an answer from you — a missing font dialog, say — Pure Collect retries once with a visible window.

• Progress appears as AE collect: 2/3 done · 1:24 elapsed.

• Two projects are collected in parallel, so the wall-clock time is roughly the slowest single project rather than the sum.

• Each project has a 15-minute timeout. If one exceeds it, only that instance stops and collection moves on.

• An After Effects session you already have open is untouched. You don’t need to quit it.

• Re-collecting is incremental: an .aep that hasn’t changed is reused, not reopened.

If a project can’t be collected, its Dynamic Link keeps pointing at the original .aep. The link is never left broken.

Clean My Project

Organises the project you have open right now, without collecting anything. Run it before a collection to lighten a heavy project, or just to tidy up.

You can choose whether to apply the project diet at the same time.

Nothing is saved automatically. No file on disk is touched and the project is not saved. Press Ctrl/Cmd + Z to undo, or Ctrl/Cmd + S to keep it.

The report

With Font / effect report on, [Project]_Report.txt lists the fonts used across the collected sequences (including fonts inside Essential Graphics titles), every effect and how often it appears, file statistics, After Effects results, and any offline media. It is written as UTF-8 with BOM, so it opens correctly in Notepad and TextEdit.

Fonts are listed, not collected — font files are licensed separately and can’t be bundled into a handoff.

Limits

Troubleshooting

Scan reports no collectible files

Make sure a sequence is genuinely active — click a clip in the timeline and scan again. A sequence holding only titles collects the project file alone, which is expected.

“Node.js unavailable”

The extension was installed incorrectly. Reinstall through the Manager app.

After Effects shows “(Not Responding)”

Normal while a project opens or saves. Let it finish.

Object masks vanish when exporting through Media Encoder

An Adobe bug in Premiere Pro 26.0.0–26.0.1, fixed in 26.0.2. Update Premiere and Media Encoder, or export directly from Premiere. Pure Collect detects affected versions and warns you. The collected data itself is correct.