Premiere Production: Clip offline in timeline, but online in project

[don-jón]

Hi there,

we are currently working in a Premire Production and have strange online/offline issues. Our production is set up like this:

- One Media Project: a project containing all media files and sequences with selection reels

- Multiple Edit Projects: each editor edits in his own project by dragging clips from the selection reel into his timelines

We are not working from a server. Instead every editor has a harddrive with all the media.

Now we are running into a strange problem:
I made an edit in my edit project by dragging clips from the media project into it. So far so good.

Now randomly some of my clips are offline in my edit. When I click "Reveal in project", the media project opens and I can see the clip, which is online in that project. There I can play it back without problems.

Only when I right-click the offline clip in my edit timeline and press "Link Media..." to reconnect it, then it will be online again. But I have to do this for every offline clip individually.

Does anyone of you have suggestions, what might be the cause of this problem and how we can solve it?

I am currently running Premiere v24.5

Windows 11

Many thanks!

[Ben Insler]

Hi @don-jón,

Agreed - this doesn't sounds like correct behavior.  Can you confirim two things before we drill down?

1. When you refer to clips as offline in your edit, do they display in the Program monitor as Media Offline (Red banner) or Media Pending (Yellow banner)?
2. Is every editor's local media hard drive mounting as the exact same drive letter on each system?  And the entire folder structure is identical across all drives?

[Kevin-Monahan]

The status of this bug report has been updated.

[don-jón]

Hi Ben:

1. They display as Media Offline in the program monitor.

2. This is where things get tricky: Some editors work on Mac, some on Windows. The folder structure however is the same on the hard drives. When we open our projects and we get asked to link missing media, we seemingly can relink everything - except when opening our timelines there are random clips offline in the timeline (but not in the media project, where they were ingested).

[don-jón]

By the way, as a temporary solution, I can select all clips in the timeline and relink them succesfully like this (I don't have to do it individually for each clip like I thought).

But it is not a permanent solution: When an other editor has relinked the clips to his media and I open the project and relink it to my path, then some clips are offline again and I have to repeat the steps.

[Ben Insler]

Are you always opening the media project first, and then edit projects afterwards while the media project is already open?
(not that this would/should be a problem - just trying to target exactly what's happening).

If so, what happens if you only open one of the edit projects where the media appears offline (close Premiere Pro, then only re-open that one edit project)?  Do you get presented with dialogs that media is offline and needs to be relinked?  Or does the project simply open with Media Offline in the timeline that you are not informed about until you encounter the red banner during playback/scrubbing?