Adobe Premiere Elements 2013 relinking render files

[AndrewWaas]

Hi, I'm using Adobe Premiere Elements 2013. I've been renderig a large project in batches to avoid over heating my computer. I.E. Render ten hours of footage, save, shut down & wait till the next day. I've now done this for 20 hours worth of footage, & as I'm in the middle of hours 20-30 my drive becomes disconected. I quickly quit out of Premiere knowing that I've lost what was in progress, but can accept that. However when I log back on after reconnecting, it shows I have to rerender EVERYTHING. Even stuff that had been saved previous days. I have on my external hard drive Adobe Premiere Elements Preview Files which is 264.4 GBS so I know the render files are there still. Now I need help on how to reconnect them so I don't have to waste all this time/computer power again. Please help me.

Thanks

[Steve Grisetti]

Are you saying you're rendering a 10-20 hour long movie as a single video file? Not to be snarky, but what is the advantage of doing this rather than outputting a series of videos at a more watchable length?

[AndrewWaas]

It's a giant project of 100s of videos that are not labeld & some are duplicates. I'm going to narrow it down to one three hour video, but I need to see everything in one timeline to know what goes where. To you this may not make sense, but to the overall project & how my mind can process info, this is what works.

[Steve Grisetti]

Sorry, Andrew, but I think working this way tends toward failure. It's not the program or your operating system or your computer is buggy. It's just that when you're working with this kind of media load, even the slightest hiccup brings the whole thing crashing down. Not even Hollywood movies are edited on one huge timeline!

So if you're determined to edit hundreds of videos onto a 20 hour timeline, I'm not sure what to recommend. Maybe another user can offer some input.

BTW, I've never heard of Premiere Elements 2013. Versions of the program weren't named after their release year until 2109. Prior to that they were versions -- version 11, 12, 13, etc. Can you confirm you're using Premiere Elements and not Premiere Pro?

[AndrewWaas]

According to the about section of the program it's "Adobe Premiere Elements 13". 

Ok fine, I'll not edit like that ever again. But so I don't have to go through a proportinatly smaller time waste in the future, let's say I have an half hour long video that the exact same thing happened to this project. All the preivew files are there still on the extertnal hard drive. Is there a way to reconnect them, at all, or do i delete those off the drive and am forced to start again?

[ElmwoodForestllc]

I would also like to know this. Additionally, Steve, Andrew didn't mean he was rendering out 20 hours of footage and exporting it as a single new video file. What he means is that he is rendering preview files of footage on the existing timeline so that he can more quickly scrub through the videos and make cuts without the playhead skipping or stalling (as regularly occurs when working with 4k footage on anything other than a multi-thousand dollar computer).

To clarify further, I would bet that Andrew is using the "Sequence > Render Entire Work Area" command to turn the timeline render indicator from yellow to green. 

As I'm sure you know, this creates preview files that get put into a folder near the original .PRV file for ease of access. Lately, I have also been encountering situations where I will open a Premiere project and find the timeline is yellow (indicating the clips have no preview files linked to them) when it should be green, even though the preview files are still in existence and easily accessable. 

So the question being asked is: is there a way to tell Premiere "look, here are the preview files, I don't need to re-render everything on the timeline." or is this simply a bug that we will have to deal with?

[Steve Grisetti]

By default, Premiere Elements looks for the PRV files in the same folder that your project file is stored, inside a folder called Adobe Premiere Elements Video Previews.

I've never tinkered with moving around the previews but, if you open the program's Preferences (under the Edit menu on a PC) and look on the ScratchDisks page you'll find options for setting where your previews are saved. 

If you lose the connection to these previews, the next time you open your project you'll get a prompt asking for help locating your preview files (or moved media files). Locate the file and when you relink it the program will automatically relink all other missing files it finds at the same location.

Beyond that I tend to leave everything right where it is when I'm editing my movies, so I've not had a lot of experiencing moving and reconnecting files.

[AndrewWaas]

Thanks, this is what I was trying to explain, but whatever. I talked with Adobe tech suport as well & they told me there is not any way really. I just have to render it all again & that it's presence would help speed it up, but I didn't notice a real difference in the time it took. Additionaly it did not give the locate lost files after the drive was reconnected, because I didn't move anything, the drive just got disconected nothing else, so that usual step was not able to help.