Deploying Adobe Premiere Elements 10 in a network environment

Adobe Premiere is an essential tool in an educational environment, especially one with a huge recent spike in video usage like ours. I was recently lucky enough to receive a number of Adobe Premiere Elements 10 (PE10) licenses to deploy throughout my network.

I know Adobe products are always horrible to deploy, but PE10 takes something bad to a whole new level.



The Problem

Unfortunately PE10 seems to have a serious incomparability with network based profile directories, like the ones most schools would be using. The product installs without issue, but when you get to the "New Project" screen the "Save In:" field is blank. Once you click "browse" to find a path to save your project, PE10 complains of a serious error and then crashes.

The exact error message is "Sorry, a serious error has occured that requires Adobe Premiere Elements to shut down. We will attempt to save your current project."

If I login to a local account (with no network based profile, obviously) everything works perfectly.

As per this thread it seems Adobe's official position is that PE10 is designed to be used locally and running it in a network environment is unsupported. This is once again a failure by Adobe in the deployment space, it seems they just can't understand we just want to "install.exe /s" their products, what is so hard about that? I don't want to learn a whole new language to deploy a product and then have to put together dodgy fixes to get it working. OK, rant over!



The Solution

There are a few parts to this solution but the core of the fix revolves around a file called "Adobe Premiere Elements Prefs" that sits in "%appdata%\Adobe\Premiere Elements\10.0". This file contains a number of user based preferences, including the paths.

The specific line in the configuration we want to set is as below. This is the line that's populated in the "Save in:" box that is giving us all the problems.

<BE.Prefs.MRU.Document.0></BE.Prefs.MRU.Document.0>

Instead of creating this file by hand we are going to do a little bit of Adobe hacking.

1. Log into a computer with PE10 installed as a local administrator.

2. Create a local folder, ensure all users have permission to read/write. I have created a folder called c:\pe10scratch and given the "Users" group permissions to this folder.

3. Launch PE10.

4. Save your "New Project" in the c:\pe10scatch folder. (You must do this)

5. It is also a good idea to go to change the paths of all scratch disks to local disks. If network paths are used this can mean massive amounts of data moving across the network and slow performance for the user. Once in PE10 select the "Edit" menu, select "Preferences" and select "scratch disks". Set a local path for all of the available option.

6. Close PE10.

Now we need to grab the "%appdata%\Adobe\Premiere Elements\10.0\Adobe Premiere Elements Prefs" file and all of the files in the c:\pe10scratch folder (or whatever you may have called it).

At this point you may also like to grab some of the registry settings from "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe". Some of the interesting ones that might save your users time are:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Elements Organizer\10.0]

"Locale"=

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Premiere Elements\10.0]

"Language"="

"ShowDriverUpdateMsg"=

"DriverUpdateMsgCount"=

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\Premiere Elements\10.0\WelcomeScreen]
"QuickLaunchApp"=

"LaunchCount"=

 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Adobe\CommonFiles\Usage\Elements10]
"OptIn"=

"Date"=

These specific registry settings and possibly some others, can be deployed on login to ensure your users don't see annoying "feedback program" and "your VGA driver isn't up to date" type messages when launching the program.



User Based Settings Deployment

Now that you have your registry settings, preferences and the empty project we need to deploy them somehow.

For the registry settings and the preferences file I am using my existing kixtart based login script. A simple script as below will do the job. The following script deploys the HKCU registry changes and the preferences file if PE10 is installed on the machine.

;setup premiere elements 10
if (exist("%programfiles%\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Elements 10")) and (exist("%appdata%\premel10.tch")=0)
  SHELL "regedit /s $logonpath\registry\premel10\premel10.reg"
  SHELL '%COMSPEC% /C xcopy "$logonpath\registry\premel10\Adobe Premiere Elements Prefs" "%appdata%\Adobe\Premiere Elements\10.0\" /E /Y /C'
  Copy ("$logonpath\generic.tch") ("%appdata%\premel10.tch") /H
endif

That is one piece of the puzzle, the other is deploying the empty project we created in step 4. Unfortunately unless this project exists on the target system, the "Save In:" box will still be empty and crash when you click browse.



Deploying PE10 and the empty project

I won't cover the actual silent deployment process because Adobe has a good write up available here (yes I just did compliment Adobe for once)

I have chosen to deploy the C:\pe10scratch folder and the empty project as part of my SCCM deployment of PE10. My deployment batch file reads as follows:

vcredist_x86.exe /Q
start /wait oem.exe /UL1033 /V"SERIALNUMBER=1111-1111-1111-1111-1111-1111"
xcopy "custom\elements" "c:\pe10scratch" /E /Y /C

Extremely simply but effective. You may also choose to deploy HKLM registry settings at the same time.

Please Adobe, think about your end users before releasing a product that requires dodgy fixes to work.