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Participant
Jun 17, 2022 12:16 AM UTC
Question

Can't relink media after the files were renamed

I have a unique and crappy situation. I lost my footage when my SD card spontaneously deleted my files. I had to send the card to a data recovery center to get the footage back.

 

Premiere Pro doesn't recognize the files now that they've been fixed and renamed. Recutting the footage to match my old voiceover has proven to be a complete nightmare. I need to figure out how to get Premiere Pro to recognize the footage even though the names have changed. 

 

Any ideas?

10 replies

Participating Frequently
Feb 16, 2025 6:31 PM UTC

I recently had to solve this issue where hundreds of files were renamed (the _Rendered part of rendered files was removed from the filename by the customer). I ended up writing a small script and running it with the ExtendScript Developer Tools.  The script below successfully relinked all files. Feel free to modify and share the snippet below.

 

var selection = app.project.activeSequence.getSelection();
for (var i = 0; i < selection.length; i++) {
    var projItem = selection[i].projectItem;
    if (projItem) {
        var oldPath = projItem.getMediaPath();
        var newFileName = oldPath.replace(/\.MP4_Rendered.mov$/, '.mov');
        projItem.changeMediaPath(newPath);
    }
}

 

 

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Community Expert
Jun 17, 2022 9:01 PM UTC

Import all the recovered files, put them in the same bin as offline files, arrange the files by media duration:

 

Then relink each file with the one that has the same duration. (Hoping that most of the files have unique durations 😉)

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Ann Bens
Community Expert
Community Expert
Jun 17, 2022 9:17 AM UTC

One option is to replace clips one by one in the Project window.

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Participant
Jun 17, 2022 10:03 AM UTC

Can you elaborate step by step? I have only been using Premiere Pro for 5 months. 

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Jeff Bugbee
Community Expert
Community Expert
Jun 17, 2022 3:48 AM UTC

If you Make Offline your media, then attempt to Link Media, perhaps you can use one of the other paramters to match your clips. Otherwise, this may be a manual linking job.

 

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Participant
Jun 17, 2022 10:02 AM UTC

When you say a "manual linking job", can you elaborate? I will do anything to not have to recut the footage which is what I've started doing. It is taking forever and the quality isn't as good as my first edit.

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Jeff Bugbee
Community Expert
Community Expert
Jun 17, 2022 1:28 PM UTC

I don't know how large your project is but generally, when I edit something, I get to know the footage fairly intimately, so if I were to offline all my media and rename all my clips, I could theoretically go through and relink them one by one just from previewing them and remembering which was which based on how I had them arranged on the timeline. Certainly easier than recutting.

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