File Import Failure - Clips randomly gone missing from project wont relink

Report · Jan 14, 2019

I have been working on a project for a couple weeks and yesterday premiere wouldn't open the project without crashing or freezing.

It would say all the media was loaded but most of the clips would appear pending and you couldnt view any clips/sequences in source or programme monitor.

I saw a suggestion to start a new project and import the entire on project into it so i did that. Initially it loaded fine but then started saying that media from a loads of the clips was missing. When i relocated the clips in their normal folders it wont relink the clips with the error message 'Importer reported a generic error'.

I went back into the old project and the same thing happened. HELP!!!

Report · Jan 14, 2019

I have just tried going into previous autosave versions of the project and the same thing is happening!

Report · Jan 15, 2019

This exact clip might be corrupted. which explains the freezing and crashing. Doe it play normally on any media player? Can you attempt to import only this file on a fresh project?

Report · Jan 15, 2019

It has happened to 225/250 clips in the project. None of the clips are corrupted, all play fine on VLC player and played fine within premiere until this happened. I am rearranging the raw files into different folders to see if that works but considering i had the whole project file - including raw footage and premiere project - on a backup hardrive and the same error occured, presumably its not to do with file location? I really dont want to lose the sequences i have already spent hours working on. If i start a new project and import all the footage from scratch, could i import sequences from the old project?

Report · Jan 17, 2019

1- Can you please share your full system specs?

2- What is your storage configuration? how many Drives, and where are you storing each thing? (Media, Projects, Cache, etc.) Is any of these drives near full?

3- Have you tried the following: Reset Preferences, Manually delete Cache files, change the location of the cache folder?

4- Can you, if possible, attempt to open the project on a different system that has the same PP version as yours?

Report · Jan 17, 2019

Try the following steps, one at a time and in the listed order.

2h, 2i and 2f

Unofficial Premiere Pro Troubleshooting Guide

Report · Jan 21, 2019

Thanks I did the above steps and for now it is holding together. Although still has an importer error warning in the bottom corner. May just have to repeat regularly for my system to cope with the project size?

Report · Jan 21, 2019

So it is doing the same thing again. After your responses I checked and cleared the Media Cache location and database which were automatically set to my laptops internal hardrive which has no available space. I assumed that would solve the problem, moving the cache to my external hardrive with the project files (its 1TB so should have plenty of space) but we are back to square one again.

Report · Jan 23, 2019

OK.

I have to recommend Steps 3H and 4 from the Troubleshooter.