Known Participant

Question

Why does Premiere spend so much time "relinking media" when opening a project?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
November 29, 2024
12 replies
9088 views

When I open a large-ish project, the Progress Dashboard on Premiere spends minutes doing what it say is "relinking media". What is it doing? Why is this necessary? It is technically a "background" process, but nothing really works until it is finished.

After a few mins, or 5-6 mins on really big project, it finishes "relinking" and then I can edit normally. But my question is why can't Premiere just save the state it is when it's done and then just open quickly the next time? Nothing has changed in my media files, why "relink"?

NOTE: I am not talking about when Premiere cannot find the correct location and you have to point it to the right place. I'm talking about normal everyday automated stuff that happens when I open a project.

theTallest77

Inspiring

Struggling with this issue as well.

We’re a team of nine. I’m the sole video editor, and we have 4 animators and 4 videographers. We all use premiere, but I obviously use it the most. We work with a high volume of content, and have a quick turnaround time. Our projects range in size from 50 to 200 GB of raw studio footage (1080p, high bitrate), AE linked comps, and motion graphic templates, and I can go through as many as 20 in a month. All of our active content is stored on a cloud server powered by AWS that we access remotely via WARP VPN. I don’t have any technical information about the server itself.

Starting with version 25.2, I noticed the same issue OP mentioned, and it got worse when we updated to 26. Our bigger projects can take the better part of a day to fully relink, and even then it’s nearly impossible to scrub through timelines and queue renders. Prior to 25.2, it was still slow, but not nearly as slow as it is now. My boss and I are currently in talks with Shade, which I tried out yesterday and was quite impressed with the performance overall, but even in that environment, the relinking process took some time (only a half hour which for my team would be a huge improvement).

I apologize in advance for not being able to provide tech details about the server, but based on what others have been discussing in this thread, are there any questions I could ask our devs about optimizations that could be made to the server to help with the relinking issue?

J

jfinlay8

Participating Frequently

Yeah it’s pretty unbearable - Adobe really lost their way. Focused too much on AI and now the basic functionality of the app barely works. Still having the issue as of 2/7/26 and Adobe obviously doesn’t care. Adding non-headline grabbing features and fixes just isn’t worth their time anymore apparently.

D

dadalavida

Participant

This just started happening to me once I upgraded to 26. M4 Max 64GB RAM, external SSDs over Thunderbolt. Never happened before. Now happens every time I open the project I’m working on.

And while I understand the concept of anything “if Premiere sees any part of the ‘name’ as different”—this will happen if I open a project, wait till Premiere has finished re-linking, close the project, and reopen it immediately afterwards—it starts re-linking all over again. It’s hard to believe that some part of the name of any file has changed.

Disabled plugins at startup—no effect.

Cleared media cache—no effect.

As for everyone else this is happening to, this is extremely frustrating and kills creative momentum.

E

Edward Scissors

Participating Frequently

I am having the same problem on my M3 Ultra running 25.6. Media stored on a 40TB QNAP server connecting via TB4. Read speeds of 1700Mbs.Only 1 TB of footage.

Done everything that has been recommended on this thread. Nothing works. Losing a lot of time. Its a new thing as well

M

Mathias Wittwer LAAX

Participant

I have the same issue, and it’s killing me. Every time I open a project, I need to wait around 10 minutes — depending on the project size — before I can actually start working. Each time Premiere crashes for some unexplainable reason, I have to wait again for it to reopen.

I’ve tried reverting to older versions, but at that point, I couldn’t even open Premiere anymore. I tried completely resetting it, deleting all presets, etc. Still no change.

This is so horrible and annoying. I spend way too much time fighting with Premiere Pro instead of actually editing for my clients. I’m on the verge of completely switching over to DaVinci, since I’m pretty much done with it. Adobe should spend more time creating stable software instead of trying to integrate unusable AI BS.

And please don’t ask me about my machine or hard drives. I work on a highly modern editing setup — the issue, with 100% certainty, is Adobe’s bad software.

Mod note: Please refrain from using profanity. Minors are reading here.

kyle huber

Participating Frequently

Can agree more! Like i mentioned i have Resolved it ( Pun intented ) [fradulent account removed by moderator] what am i paying for? I would expect top support when its costing 50 plus a month. thats alot i can save when other software is free or ALOT cheaper, AND it works/.....

MyerPj

Community Expert

@kyle huber , that's just so cute and adorable, your little pun, I can't wait till you post it a third time or fourth even?

kyle huber

Participating Frequently

@adobe has this been resolved....( pun included ) I am having same issue. costed me days of lost work

D

De Geliefde

Participating Frequently

Dear Kyle,

I found this immediately resolved (on my Mac Mini Pro 4) when I stepped back to 25.2.0. It stopped doing it and I have not gone forward in versions since then. I did notice some odd stuff happening with 'dynamiclinkmanager' with a particular 4k project, going to media encoder v 25.4, which I have yet to resolve and may be to do with the version disparity - Adobe, can you help?

kyle huber

Participating Frequently

I have contacted Adobe but its taking weeks for them to get back to me. Why i "resolved" it my self lol.

Check more issues here after reverting. 25.2
Its clear as its adobe issue.

N

nokipowlonski

Participant

Hello!
I had the same problem. Premiere scans and relinks media every time I open a large project (90 MB) on a 20 TB external hard drive.
Premiere froze at 25% of the relinking process.
I was able to open the project correctly by deactivating the plugin at startup.
I hope this helps some of you!

O

Ovidius9000Author

Known Participant

" by deactivating the plugin at startup."

??

caroline_edits

Community Manager

We can teach you how! With Premiere closed, hold ALT (Windows) or OPTION (Mac) on your keyboard. Keep holding the key down, then launch Premiere. Keep holding the key until a window appears with startup options. Select "Disable third-party plugins" and select OK.

Here's a YouTube video showing you how: https://adobe.ly/45jDU3o

Let us know if that helps,

Caroline

R

Registration5E5A

Participant

Some of the responses in this thread are extremely frustrating.

This 5 to 20 minutes of 'relinking' Premiere needs to do every time you open a project was not a problem before version 24.0. This is not just some normal operation Premiere did before this that we didn't notice and don't understand because we're luddites. This is new.

It's also absurd to say that we shouldn't expect to be able to work with a NAS anymore, like we've been doing for decades without issue. No other Adobe program behaves like this. None of Adobe's competitor applications in this space behave like this.

We're preparing to dump Adobe for Davinci. Adobe's complete lack of action on this is ridiculous.

J

jd_9026

Participating Frequently

You are completely correct. None of this behavior is normal -- and it's crippling for a professional application to behave this way. I have come back to Premiere for the first time in 5 years after doing several features on Avid Media Composer and there is a lot of new stuff I like. But this kind of thing is enough to decide not to pursue Premiere for the next project. I sincerely hope it gets cured, and soon.

E

Evan5C9C

Participant

Same here, working with a large project from a NAS drive. Been dealing with this for over a year Adobe. Not holding my breath for this to be fixed anytime soon. Been using Davinci more and more, it has no issues with this.

J

jd_9026

Participating Frequently

I'm having the same issue. My project is not even that big -- maybe 100 hours of Canon C300 MKII footage. But it takes over 10 minutes to "relink" everytime I open. My material is on a NAS -- this should not be happening.

J

jd_9026

Participating Frequently

In my testing, this appears to be an issue exclusively with media over SMB protocol. If you're using iSCSI volumes over your NAS the problem goes away completely.