Problems with CS5.5 on a networked account

Question

Hi,
I am currently trying to use Premiere Pro CS5.5 (with updates) on a network, and having problems getting the work space screen up.
After loading up Premiere Pro, I can choose a sratch area and select my sequence settings, but after this the programme just hangs and gives me no work area.
Has anyone come across this problem before, if so is there something I need to do in order for it to bring up the work space?
Any advice/tips much appreciated, starting to do my tree in, and desperately need to get it working!
Thanks

Answer 1

Rather than a not particulally helpful stock standard ' this is not Adobe supported' blah blah blah.
We all know that Adobe do not support Network Homes, and never have. We're so lucky we've been able to use workarounds at all!
Adobe should test their stuff and make their programming abstracted enough to work in these situations. Hard coded paths and making assumptions about where a users' home is is just plain bad programming.
A users' home may not be in /Users, it may not be on the same drive (lots of new machines have both SSD and HDs now), it may be on an external drive, or it *may* be on a network.
There are plenty of programmatical ways to determine this.
Having your home 'eleswhere' should not stop the program working. Are you listening Adobe? (and Microsoft).
It is not about 'supporting' network homes — its about having the program flexible enough to work with a home when that is not just in /Users.
Any way, here's some real help —
Adobe Premiere 5.5 can be made to work with a couple of symlinks.
Firstly, like Acrobat, you'll need to redirect the following folder to a local disk
     ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Premier Pro/5.5
I used MCX Folder redirection to redirect this to
     /tmp/@%/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Premier Pro/5.5
The next thing that will also help (though not sure if it is completely necessary, but certainly good practise for large video projects and files) —
I split the internal drives on my Lab machines. One partition is called 'Storage' and is read writeable by all.
I create another MCX Folder redirection for the following
     ~/Desktop/My Scratch Disk
redirected to
     /Volumes/Storage/@%
Students are directed to save their projects into this folder on the Storage drive.
They should also be made aware that this menas their projects are specific to a particular machine, and that they may not get backed up, and can be removed at any time.
This has worked a treat in my Labs (80+ Macs) running 10.6.8 and Premiere CS 5.5 (Part of a Master Collection CS5.5 install)