Premiere pro nests all my clips and clears my timeline when I "save as"

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
January 4, 2026
2 replies
185 views

Normally when I click "Save as", I keep the original file name, it gives me the little pop up warning me I'm about to save over the old version essentially, and then next time I open the program everything is right where I left it. But this time when I did that, the whole window went grey as soon as I clicked "ok". I closed the program and opened the file again, and my whole timeline its previous contents in my project panel as one nested sequence. I was EXTREMELY lucky that I had just happened to forget to do a save until I was already finished. The rest of the clips and audios I used were still maintained in the project panel too btw, if that's important. The "fix" seems to be changing the file name before I save, but this is quickly gonna become a pain in the butt and kill my computer storage, since I'm a "better be safe than sorry" kind of mid-edit saver. Any way I could've messed with some settings by accident? I made sure I was saving them as prproj files, so its not that.

I'm on a pc and am using version 25.6.3 (build 2). Thank you!

Error or problem

Christian.Z

Community Expert

Please provide detailed specs of your system, including your storage configuration as well as your OS and version of Premiere.

Can you please share a screen shot or a screen recording of the issue?

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PaulMurphy

Community Expert

Saving different copies of a Premiere Pro project does not duplicate your media.

A .prproj file only contains edit information and links to your media files. It does not include the media itself. Your video, audio, and images stay in the same place on your hard drive. Project files are usually very small, often under 30 MB, even for large projects.

Because of this, saving multiple versions of a project will not use much extra storage space.

When opening a project in a newer version of Premiere Pro, for example moving from 2025 to 2026, it is best to save the project with a new file name. Keep the older project file as a backup. If anything goes wrong during the update, you can safely open the older version again.

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Elliot257333584xieAuthor

Inspiring

Even if its not a big deal for my computer storage, I still don't want it to do this. It's not like I just started video editing and don't know what save as is supposed to do, I want it to continue to save my progress and leave everything exactly where it is like its been doing for the past few years I've been making video projects. I shouldn't have to change the file name every time, especially because I will 100% forget to do so one of these days and have to start all over when everything irreversibly nests into one big mass. Also a 30 mb file isn't considered large sure, but several of them per single video project adds up quickly. I'm also an artist and my laptop isn't exactly professional grade, so I gotta be good about not cluttering up the more limited storage space I have with unnessesary stuff.

Do you know how I can continue saving as the same file name without the timeline being wiped out, as I've been able to do up until a few hours ago?

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PaulMurphy

Community Expert

Why are you using Save As instead of Save? I assumed it was because you're upgrading Premiere to a new version, but if that's the case, it should only prompt you to update a project file once a year.

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