Marker colors gone after closing Premiere

[usconner7796]

I made a bug report last week about this last week, but it hasn't been revolved so I'm hoping someone over here can help. 

I'm working on a 2021 MacBook Pro M1, and Premiere 24. 3.0.

For what I edit, I like to mark the source for my selects and color code them with notes so I can quickly & easily find what I need. For the last week, every morning I open Premiere to find that all of the markers set to green with no color coding, BUT the notes are still there. Screenshots showing before & after are attached.

I opened up a few older projects to see if it was a system wide problem, but my old projects have their old color coding, so I am not sure what is going on. This only started on 4/9 and nothing had changed with my system to precipitate this change. Since then, I've shut down, reopened, rebooted, upated Premiere & my OS and reset my settings, all to no avail. 

Please help!

[Ben Insler]

Hi @usconner7796 - I am not able to reproduce this in 24.3.0.  Are there any more specific details you can share, particularly the exact process where you see this happening, and can predict the behavior?  For example:

• This only happens in projects that I created in 24.3.0.  Any pre-existing project don't have the issue even when I create new markers in those old projects.
• This happens when I change a marker to a new color.  Existing markers don't change color simply by saving the project, but if I try to change the color of an existing marker, the color change won't save.
• This only happnes on markers that are created with the "Add *color* marker" hotkey command.  If I create a default (green) marker and then double-click on the marker to change the color by clicking on the swatch in the Edit Marker window, the new color does save correctly.

Any specific info on the exact steps you're taking to reproduce this issue would be helpful.

Also, any chance you'd be able to send me one of your project files where this is failing?  Just the .prproj itself, no media.  If you can, we might be able to detmine if there are any breadcrumbs we can follow in your project specifically to find the issue.

[usconner7796]

Thanks for getting back to me.

• This started in 24.2.1, then I updated to 24.3.0 to see if it would fix the problem, but it didn't. 
• This is happening in all of my projects created since April 8th. It was the morning of April 9th when I opened my April 8th projects to find all the colors gone.
• On projects created before the 8th, the marker colors are still there, however over the weekend I ran a test and put a marker in an old project, saved it, closed the project, then closed Premiere. When I reopened Premiere and the old project with the new marker, all of the markers had reverted to green.
• I don't use the hotkey command to change the color, just the window because if I change the color, 99% of the time I am also adding a note.
• Haven't had any error messages. All of my systems have been running fine. No changes at all before this.

I can send you a "failing" project file. I can evenn send you a non-failing one to compare, if you'd like. Where do I send it?

[Ben Insler]

Both would be great!  You can send them to this email address.

[Ben Insler]

Thanks for sending the project files!

I opened up both of your projects in Premiere Pro 24.3.0 and I do see a lot of green markers, but also markers of other colors.  I'm also able to save the project, even after modifying some marker colors, and the existing marker colors are preserved.  

I've obscured the clip names below in case they are sensitive - you should be able to recognize them though.  These were the two clips (one from each project) that I referenced which already had markers present on them.  Both have animated GIFs included below.  The first frame of each GIF shows the markers on the clips as they were opened, unmodified as received from you, in Premiere Pro.  The second frame shows the markers that I modified as Yellow and saved.  This Yellow change persisted after close/reopen in both.

All appears to be working on my end.  Are the results I'm seeing what you'd expect to see? Do marker colors still revert to green (default) when you open either of these projects on your end?  

K*** ****S RAW.mp4

E**** "N*****" ********e Raw.mp4

[usconner7796]

I'm happy that the colors are working for you, yet frustrated because they still are not doing so for me.  I am going to email you a screen recording of what I'm experiencing so you can see in real time what is going on.

Additionally, I have Premiere Pro Beta on this computer but have not been using it. After seeing that the marker colors showed up for you, I launched the "E" project I sent in  Beta to see if they would propogate for me. Sadly, they still are all green.

Could this be a RAM issue with my MAC? There is still about 150 GB available on my MacBook Pro and 600 GB available on the external drive I'm using ATM.

[Ben Insler]

Ha.  I appreciate your restrained annoyance.  I had no intention of suggesting It's working for me... seeeeeee. 

We'll get this figured out!

The strange thing is that your project file containing E**** "N*****" ********e Raw.mp4 opens for you with all markers on that clip as green, but opens for me with a variety of marker colors on that clip. This indicates that the marker color data is in the project file - your system is bypassing it for some reason.

Two things: 

1.  In Premiere Pro > Settings > Media..., are any of the top three XMP checkboxes enabled?

If not...

2.  When the system does unpredictable and unreproduceable things like this, sometimes the preferences need to be reset.  Hold Command while launcing Premiere Pro.  You will be presented with a Reset Options dialog box.  Check the Reset app preferences option, and click Continue.  This will reset your application preferences back to their default settings.  Anything you have configured in any of the application preferences (Premiere Pro > Settings) will have to be reconfigured.  Any custom keyboards or workspaces you've saved will not be deleted, but Premiere Pro will revert to using the default keyboard/layout, so you'll have to reselect your customized ones if you have saved any.

Open the project after resetting the prefrences and see if the marker behavior has changed.

[usconner7796]

After posting my bug report but before your 1st reply, I did do a reset, so I do not remember what the top three media settings were before the reset (which obviously did not fix the problem). But this is them now:

[scottadderton]

Hi guys,

I was having a similar issue where I would try to change the color of a marker in the timeline and it WOULD change color sucessfully, but when I would save the project and reopen it, the color change did NOT stick. I was doing all of this in 24.2.1.

So after testing a million different options including what Ben recomended in the resetting the app preferences and even having another editor on the production we are on, try to change the same marker in the same project, it WOULD work for him, it came down to an issue I was seeing in 24.2.1. I installed 24.0.3 and now the color change sticks when I save and reopen. I have not tried installing 24.3.

Maybe this helps?

Scott-

[Ben Insler]

Thanks for the assist @scottadderton!  Nice to see you.

@usconner7796 With "Write clip markers to XMP" enabled, Premiere Pro is going to attempt to actually add marker metadata to your source media files on disk when you add markers to clips in the source monitor.  If Premiere Pro determines that it cannot modify the source files of a specific type, it will write siedcare XMP files instead, but if Premiere Pro can modify these source files, it will actually change these source files on disk by inserting this metadata.  This is definitely an option/workflow that you want to explicitly enable if you intend to use this feature, and otherwise keep disabled.  XMP workflows can be extremely powerful for immediately sharing markers in certain environments, but they do run the risk of creating complications as the source media is altered.

In your case, there could be one of a few things happening.  You could have both markers that were saved into your project file (the ones that I'm seeing when I launch your project), and markers saved into the clip XMP data on disk (which I won't see since I don't have your media).  So on my side everything looks like it's working correctly when I open your project, but on your side, the clip XMP data is overriding the project XMP data... in which case we are not actually looking at the same set of markers at all.  This doesn't totally explain why the marker color is not sticking, even if it is being saved to XMP.  We could make some guesses, but I'm not sure that's helpful.  That said, it is totally possible that the XMP setting was not enabled for part of your project (which would initially keep markers contained to the project file itself), and then became enabled over the course of the project, creating a workflow branch where XMP markers were now being saved/used in the source media instead of the project.

First, please turn off "Write clip markers to XMP". 

Then, please open up a new clip (or import one) that has no markers on it.  Try to add markers of different colors.  Save, close, and re-open Premiere, and launch that project.  See if the marker color now sticks.  If it does, this is definitely related to the markers being written down to XMP.

Finally, writing markers to XMP only impacts source media clips.  Regardless of the two steps above, you should always be able to add markers of any color to sequences.  Please also confirm that sequence markers do hold their color after saving and relaunching Premiere.

The above will confirm whether or not XMP is creating your problem.  Unfortunatley, if it is, there's no quick way to convert all XMP markers to Project-centric markers.  It'll just be a manual process to fix... or avoid on the next project.

[scottadderton]

Super interesting stuff there Ben! 

@usconner7796 Regardless of what your tests come up with, you might want to take a look at Automation Blocks for Premiere Pro.

https://aescripts.com/automation-blocks-for-premiere-pro/

They have a script that will transfer sequence markers to a clip and clip markers to a Sequence. Maybe there is a way you can transfer your clip markers to a new fresh sequence sequence markers and see if that makes a difference when you save. Then set your XMP preferences the way Ben is saying, clear all the markers on your clip(I'd make a copy of the clip and put it somewhere else so you have a backup if indeed it did save markers to the file) save, reopen, and use Automation Blocks to transfer the Sequence markers on the new fresh sequence back to the clip that is fresh with no markers.

We had to do a version of this on our project bc we had an issue where we had to transfer clip markers to a sequence markers in a Multicam sequence. That was an old problem. In my new issue, Preniere not saving my color change in a marker in a sequence, I had to go from 24.2.1 back to 24.0.3 to solve my issue.

If this sounds like a dumb idea just ignore me. I'm just thinking outloud and I might not have a full understanding your issue.

Let me know if I'm not helping! Hahaha!

Scott-

[usconner7796]

That appears to be it! Not sure how it got turned on but did what you said, even ran two tests with different new clips/projects and they came back with the marker colors.

Yes, the older projects that lost the colors did not bring them back, but that's ok. As long as I still have the notes, I can re-color them.

Thank you for your patience and all your help!!

[Ben Insler]

Great!