Premiere Pro deleted all of my original video files for good. Over 18 hours of editing and priceless footage I cant just re record.

[bens83139868]

So, today I rendered my project using premiere pro. When I watched the final video after export, half of it says media offline. I tried to re link the media only to find that half of my original footage has been permanently deleted off my hard drive.

I haven't deleted any of it myself, its not in my recycle bin it's just gone. Ive tried using an old autosave to fix the problem but the media is still offline, because my files have miraculously disappeared.

What's going on????? Has anybody else had a similar problem and fixed it? I am beyond angry. It is priceless footage that cant be re created WTF!!!!!!!!

Can anyone help me please?

Thanks.

[R Neil Haugen]

Premiere doesn't "work" with the file systems. It simply reads them.

So the loss is something within the crash, your system seems to have "lost" it's file record section or something like that. Part of the crash issue, probably. But not "caused" by Premiere.

Another thing that many users don't understand ... Premiere does not duplicate or move your files when you "import" them into Premiere. In Premiere, that "import" action only gets a referernce of the file location on disc in Premiere's metadata for the Project assets. That's all.

Several users have "imported" media into Premiere, then moved or deleted the media from the computer, and were SHOCKED when Premiere couldn't find it anymore.

"It was in my sequence yesterday, where is it NOW?"

Project files and sequences are simply stored metadata ... that's all. Essentially a text file of the assets and effects applied to a group of clips. So their media was wherever they put their media. Premiere had done nothing to it.

[Miltong44]

Possibly unrelated, and I realise this is an old thread, but I just lost ALL of my project files and sequences when I upgraded from Premiere Pro CS 6 to CC

On first launch CC asked to convert project files from previous versions and when it finished this task all of my old project files had disappeared. The folder structure and contents of my User/Documents/Adobe folder where all of my project files and sequences resided appears to have been modified by CC somehow during this conversion process, and all of the old projects files and sequences have been lost.  I have tried recovery apps but no trace of the old files exists whatsoever.  I think the whole folder just gets overwritten immediately by this conversion process.

Also, FWIW, my auto-saved projects are no longer readible in CS6 - I get an error message saying they are corrupted, and they can only be opened in CC now.  

[Pdigilio4]

same. 13 hours of editing. and a ton of money spent on this video. and its now gone. only nothing from customer service, its such a big deal to me. adobe, respond to this please. this is rediculous, and you dont care to fix the issue. 

[Edited by moderator]

[R Neil Haugen]

While I understand the need to rant, as I've certainly posted some epic ones on here, you don't give us anything to try to help you with. And quite often, the forum here is fat better at Help than Adobe's Help system.

What's your computer, including the discs that the programs and media are stored on?

Did you have auto-save enabled? Did you make any iterative save-as project copies? And did you follow typical computer safety processes of creating backup copies on other drives?

Have you searched for "hidden" files on your computer?