Working on a Show from Two Machines
A show in Dropbox, open on the laptop and the desk at once. What Prismatik does about it, and what it cannot.
Overview
Keeping the projects folder in a synced service — Dropbox, Drive, OneDrive — and opening the same show on two machines is a normal way to work: the programmer marks tracks on one, the designer edits the patch on the other.
It works, with one thing to understand: Prismatik protects you from silently losing work, but it does not merge. Two people editing the same show at the same moment will still have to decide whose version wins. What has been removed is the case where nobody was ever told.
What happens
When the other machine saves
Within about fifteen seconds you get a notice that the show was saved elsewhere, with a Reload button.
Nothing reloads on its own. If you have unsaved changes here, reloading would discard them — so the notice says so, and the choice stays yours.
The five-minute auto-save
Prismatik snapshots the open show every five minutes. Before it writes
show.json it checks whether the file moved since this machine loaded it.
If it did, the auto-save is skipped and you are told why. The snapshot is still taken — that goes into the show’s history and is always safe — but the shared file is left as the other machine wrote it.
This is deliberate. Losing a background auto-save costs you a few minutes of work you can still see on screen. Overwriting somebody’s explicit save costs them work they believed was safe.
How to work with it
Divide by show, not by tool. Two people in the same show file is workable; two people in the same track is asking for a lost afternoon.
Save before you walk away. The five-minute auto-save is a safety net, not a hand-off. If the other machine is about to pick the show up, save explicitly.
Reload before you start a session. If the show has been touched elsewhere since you last had it open, take the reload before doing work, not after.
Let the sync settle. Dropbox and the rest replace the file rather than editing it. Give it a moment to land before reloading, or you may pick up a half-written file — Prismatik will notice again when the real one arrives.
What this does not do
- It does not merge. Whoever reloads adopts the other version wholesale.
- It does not lock. Nothing stops both machines editing at once; you are told after the fact, not prevented beforehand.
- It does not cover media. Audio, video and other assets are ordinary files in the project folder and follow the sync service’s own conflict handling — which usually means a “conflicted copy” appearing beside the original.
Related
- Project Folder Workflow — how a project is laid out on disk
- Multi-Site Venue Deployment — permanent installs across sites