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Participant
June 10, 2013
Answered

Premiere Pro CS6 not locating media, freezing

  • June 10, 2013
  • 17 replies
  • 24280 views

For the last couple of days, Premiere Pro on my laptop (15" Apple Retina MacBook Pro, 12gb ram, 2.7GHz i7 - USB 3.0 Lacie drive) has been having trouble locating media. When I open a project, the "Locating Media" diologe shows the progress bar start moving, then stop and not move again. Hitting "Cancel" makes the pinwheel of patience come up. When I use the "Command + Option + ESC" command, Premiere Pro CS6 is not shown as "Not Responding". Force quitting the app and restarting the computer doesn't do anything to change this behavior.

Would appreciate any guidence on how to remedy this.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Kevin-Monahan

Hi CalebBarker,

Since you have not returned to the thread, I'll assume that you eventually got your issue solved. My feeling is that you may have a corrupted project or corrupt media. Let us know if you have any insight. Thanks.

  • For others on this thread, see if you can begin a new project, import the same media, close, then reopen the project. If you can do that, but you can't do it with your current project, you've got a corrupt project—seek out a backup or autosave of your project.
  • If the media doesn't import to the new project, then your media might have some issues preventing it from being imported or reconnected to.
  • Media not being detected can also be related to you not having permissions to use certain MPEG codecs unless you have activated Premiere Pro properly.

Activate and deactivate Adobe products

For anyone else having this issue, please create a new post.

Thanks,
Kevin

17 replies

Participant
April 16, 2018

I too ran into this situation just today. I realize this is an old forum however if you're like me you still stumbled upon it way after the fact. Im using adobe cc 2018, tried opening a project for work a few weeks after i last worked on it and same issue. No, there was not an issue with corrupt media or anything like that. My fix was like stated above, create a new project, go to file>import and import your previous project thats not opening for you. Now, then it'll open the link media dialog box, CLICK CANCEL. Once you do that, you can relink your media in the projects pane. I saved after each successful link, however i had no crashes or issues doing it this way. In fact, i was even able to select multiple items at once and relink them all at once, so im not sure what the issue was, but its fixed now.

Participant
August 30, 2017

Open your project and go to Edit -> Preferences -> Media and clean the media cache database.  Or if the project is frozen, you can manually locate and delete the cache file in default location C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common.

Kevin-Monahan
Community Manager
Kevin-MonahanCommunity ManagerCorrect answer
Community Manager
June 1, 2017

Hi CalebBarker,

Since you have not returned to the thread, I'll assume that you eventually got your issue solved. My feeling is that you may have a corrupted project or corrupt media. Let us know if you have any insight. Thanks.

  • For others on this thread, see if you can begin a new project, import the same media, close, then reopen the project. If you can do that, but you can't do it with your current project, you've got a corrupt project—seek out a backup or autosave of your project.
  • If the media doesn't import to the new project, then your media might have some issues preventing it from being imported or reconnected to.
  • Media not being detected can also be related to you not having permissions to use certain MPEG codecs unless you have activated Premiere Pro properly.

Activate and deactivate Adobe products

For anyone else having this issue, please create a new post.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community and Engagement Strategist – Adobe Pro Video and Audio
Participant
December 12, 2016

Hi everyone. I think I found a solution to this problem. Premiere would get stuck on locating media. Then I tried loading an auto save. The auto save loaded, but was asking me to locate media manually. What I noticed is that the original file path had a different drive letter than my drive currently had. I closed premiere an changed the drive letter for my drive, then reloaded the original file and Premiere was able to successfully open the project. So go ahead and make sure you drive letter matches what you were using before. Hope this helps.

Participant
February 15, 2017

ANOTHER SOLUTION:

Simply move your project (the one you're trying to open) to a different location so that any relative media links are broken. (You may need to temporarily change the name of your media directory if they're hard linked–this didn't happen for me).

Then choose to offline all when asked.

Now save as a new project back to your original directory location.

When you next try to open that project it should find the media and everything should be online again and happy.

brettv7748414
Participant
October 25, 2016

Hello, Adobe? This is crippling. Any help?

Participant
July 18, 2016

Did anyone here find out how this whole issue is all about because I have just experienced it this month and it is still torturing me.

Please if anyone got the solution please share it with us

kyndrocity
Participant
July 20, 2016

I had (past tense) this same issue- which mine started when adobe first told me I needed to download the latest version (I was on on CC 2015 already) in order to open that dang file for some reason, so I did.  After that it made it difficult to open all the projects I had previously been working on (apparently it's no bueno to 'upgrade' in the middle of projects).  Well, I got them all to open except one project which kept freezing during the locating media action. 

I had a premiere folder with the premiere file on the same drive as my footage.  But in a different folder.  I moved everything into one folder, a different folder, (not sure if that is what worked) or the fact that I opened from an autosave file (which still had to be converted but at least gave me the option to locate the media).  Once it gave me the locate media option I personally was having problems with it freezing when it went to locate the remainder of the clips at some point (probably a file it didn't like) so after a few tries I said offline them all, skip the render files, and then opened it up and reconnected the media once the project was opened.  Bam.  It works.

Thanks Adobe for your great feedback.

Participant
May 16, 2015

Here is what I did. I imported the project in after effects and then exported it as a new premier project. The new project opened in premier without a problem.I hope it would work for you as well.

mikkellk80855561
Participant
April 22, 2015

Good Day,

I am using Premiere Pro CS6 and I have been been doing metalogging for my film. I am having this issue of locating media when I changed my project over from a failing hard drive to a new one, I left the project on OVERNIGHT to locate media and its in the same spot. With such metalogging I have only been changing the names and descriptions of the files in the bin and I have a good few days work done on it. Is there any way to save the integrity of that bin without having to start an entirely new project over and start from scratch. This is most annoying.

I don't believe I have any corrupt rendered files, perhaps its a corrupted video?

Any help would be appreciated as I see no fix or announcement has come up for this problem yet.

ThomasBlomquist-wDdBpr
Participant
March 3, 2015

Got the same issue. Using CC. I did move the files but should get the "Locate missing files"-dialogue.

Is Adobe following this forum?

Participant
January 19, 2015

I am having the SAME issue.

I realize there is an option to import the original working file (maybe even AFTER you've deleted the Preview files), but that still has yet to work as well.  When I hit CANCEL on "locating media" it just gives me a spinning wheel.


Still unable to open my project. Adobe help?