Managing card media across projects and archives

Question

What is the best resource for learning about keeping project media linked when archiving or moving between projects?
All chip-based cameras have a file-naming scheme that is similar. (00000, 00001, 00002, etc.) When you offload the footage and re-format the card for more shooting, the naming starts over. If you lose links to that media, there seems to be no easy way to know which file you should point Premiere to.
i.e. Is file 00001 the shot of a car from your day one shoot or is is a shot of a house from your day two shoot?

Answer 1

I need to be certain I won't have media management issues.
Here's the thing: with media such as AVCHD, the file naming issue is one that falls squarely on the shoulders of the consortium that "designed" the AVCHD spec, and not Adobe's or Premiere Pro's. It was silly and short-sighted, without a doubt--and it's one of the reasons that I think AVCHD is going to eventually fade into obsolence the way that HDV has. The bottom line is that it's up to the editor (the person, not the software) to exercise caution when working with such formats.
Premiere Pro uses absolute links in the project file XML to specify file locations. This means that if you move your project to another machine, and the footage is on the same lettered/IDed drive and in the same folder structure, it will relink without asking you. If it can't find one of the files, you are asked to relink (as you know); if the folder structure is the same, Premiere Pro will relink all files in the same relative folder structure as specified in the project. So, yeah--it's a pain figuring out which "00001.MTS" is being asked for, but if you guess wrong, you can just close the project without saving and try again. You can also skip past the Missing File dialog and relink media from within the project, once it's open. If you can identify where one particular clip is supposed to be, you can select a bin, right-click and select Link Media. This lets you be a little more selective, but again, requires you to know what goes where.
In the end, if you're not moving your project around, you should have to worry about media going offline. If you are moving your project around, it requires some due diligence on your part to create mirrored media folders on one or more systems. In the era of tapeless video, the camera manufacturers have somewhat neglected the editor in the race to make things faster/cheaper/etc. That results in stuff like AVCHD, so you really can't fault Premiere Pro if it has to play the cards it's dealt.
EDIT: For what it's worth, a big part of the problem--particularly with AVCHD--is that there is a lack of tools that would enable the editing of clip metadata as written into the folder structures. That would mitigate a lot of the problems we have. Personally, I want to task Adobe with this: come up with a media ingest, logging and management tool that sits outboard of Premiere Pro and is geared toward proper preparation of tapeless camera assets for professional post-production. There are some third-party tools out there for the various formats--P2 Viewer for Panasonic P2, XDCAM Browser for XDCAM, RedcineX for R3D--and they all suck. Big time. Premiere Pro is loaded to the gills with metadata awareness, but it does little good if you're locked into metadata that is only accessible within a project file. If they had this, Premiere Pro would own.