Inspiring

Question

"Recovered clips" bin constantly being created when I re-open projects?

Forum|Forum|7 months ago
January 31, 2026
16 replies
338 views

So for the past year or so I’ve been noticing (on the most up to date versions of Premiere) that when I re-open a project I’ll frequently see this bin created with duplicate media called “Recovered Clips”. When I searched for that issue here on the forum, I found a couple threads discussing it regarding when using the “Productions” feature. But here’s the thing – I’m a solo freelance editor working on single projects, not collaborating and not working on anything necessitating “productions” at all! So I have no clue why this is happening.

The other variable that is NOT occurring are crashes. It would make sense to me if this Recovered Clips bin were created after a crash or something. But nope – this happens on projects that were safely saved, closed, computer powered down, restarted and re-opened the next day. There’s no reason to “recover” anything.

The one thing I can say is that I did once work with a team of editors about a year ago, where we had to pass projects back and forth over dropbox. The lead editor on that had me change some preferences to set me up for collaboration which I believe is probably related to this “Productions” feature. But since that job finished, I have not needed to use any collaborative features and most of my gigs are small commercials not in need of what Productions offers. That said, I’m not really sure how to disable it after searching google and poking around in menu preferences.

I also noticed when I open a project where this just happened, I opened Window > Production and see nothing listed here:

So yeah, if it truly is related to this “Productions” feature I don’t understand why it’s happening to me since clearly I’m not using that. Is it a bug or a menu preference I’m not seeing? Thank you!

Edit: if it’s helpful, I’m on a Mac Studio M2 Ultra (Silicon) running MacOS 15.4 and Premiere 25.6.3.

A

adventurous_Fluttere400

Known Participant

I’d check whether the project was originally created or modified while Productions was enabled, since some of those settings can persist even if you’re no longer actively using Productions. It could also be a Premiere bug, especially if it happens consistently without crashes, so testing the same project in a new version or with a clean project setup might help narrow it down.

jrwingAuthor

Inspiring

Hi thank you. The forum won’t appear to let me edit my original post so I could clarify, but I explained further down in the thread that I’ve experimented with starting projects from complete scratch and it continues to happen on totally fresh projects (7 months later).

J

jabeenmerchant

Participant

I didn’t even know ‘Productions’ existed until very recently. I’ve been getting this same ‘recovered clips’ folder too. The first time, it was a team project but the second one is a normal, regular single user Premiere Pro project file. The ‘Recovered clips’ started appearing once the project file got a little heavier with more assets added and multiple copies of timelines. We need some Adobe engineer to explain what this is.

K

Kevin-Monahan

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Thanks for the additional reports. I’m wondering whether the common factor may be the project’s history rather than a crash or media-cache issue. Did the affected project originate as a Team Project, template, or separate .prproj, or were sequences/bins imported or copied from another project?

Before deleting the Recovered Clips bin, please save a backup and select one affected timeline clip, then choose Reveal in Project. If Premiere cannot locate its original project item, try Edit > Reassociate Source Clips and point Premiere to the project that should contain the clip. Adobe documents Reassociate Source Clips for restoring these cross-project associations.

For anyone using Productions, please also let us know whether the project was created inside the Production, added with Add Project to Production, or copied into the Production folder through Finder or Explorer. Adding an existing project through the Production panel is supported, but that distinction may help identify the common workflow.

Thanks,
Kevin

jrwingAuthor

Inspiring

For what it’s worth, this is still happening to me on the smallest of projects, all of which have been started from scratch (not a template, not team project, not using productions, and after closing normally without crashes). If I start a completely fresh project file and start adding assets, even a minimal amount, invariably it starts happening like clockwork. Drives me crazy, but now I just drag everything into a zDump folder. I’ve kind of given up on bin management in Premiere at this point.

colbymakes

Participant

I am also getting this same behavior with my adobe productions. Seemingly at random, various clips and assets will appear in a Recovered Clips folder, despite there being no crash or anything.

jrwingAuthor

Inspiring

Yep. I also confirmed that I’m not using productions and it’s still persisting for me even with fresh projects/templates.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

First, I’m mostly a solo worker in my own small shop. And I nearly totally work in Productions ... because it makes like so much simpler.

ALL my libraries of graphics, my b-roll, sound libraries, template projects, everything is available for any project without trouble or fuss. So much easier and faster.

But I never have to ‘recover’ clips ... which indicates you have a different problem. I’d check where your cache files are located, first thing. Then dump them.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

jrwingAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for responding! Productions could be interesting to investigate further, but as a commercial editor of nearly 2 decades I honestly never really have to cross-reference graphics or b-roll from other projects (unless it’s a repeat client, but even then usually all the footage is unique to the specific edit, and graphics are provided unique to that campaign). Almost none of my clients ever request or require stock or additional graphics assets not already provided by them for use in their campaign.

About the only thing I can imagine needing to in a general sense across various projects would be my library of SFX assets but I have those all pretty well organized in finder and am content with just pulling them in on a case-by-case basis, preferring to keep things light and simple. Maybe I’m a bit old school about it, originally coming up Avid and FCP7 and then moving to Premiere around 2012, stuck in my ways as it were... ;) But when I have time, I’d be happy to take a deeper look into how I might leverage the feature in the future.

I do regularly dump my cache files when I transition to new projects, however, so I’m not sure if that’s the issue. Perhaps it’s a bug then? I wonder if anyone else has experienced this who doesn’t use Productions.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

Yea, in your case, Productions wouldn’t be a huge benefit. In mine, I reuse broll occasionally, sound libraries quite often. And I simply set up the Production so each client type, and within that, client, gets their own project.

Recovering clips on a routine basis is simply weird behavior. Something I would really like to get figured out though

Question ... where are your projects stored? What’s the file tree used? If there’s a Production folder involved, that might be it. As Productions does create a ‘physical’ folder on the drive.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.