Unknown Error Opening Project - Corrupted file and all Auto-Saves - Premiere 2020

[sarah69841986]

I was working on a huge project file. Rendered a sequence through media encoder, and was going back in Premiere when:

1. Premeire Crashed
2. Trying to re-opn my save launched a "Unknown Error:
3. This spread to EVERY auto-save until one from 5 hours ago

This was of course, extremely time sensitive, and now I'm SOL thanks to "unknown" reasons. 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Sarah,

Very sorry this happened to you. We've all been there but that doesn't make it any less painful, I know. First thing, check your Creative Cloud folder to see if there's a more recent Auto Save that has not yet been corrupted.

Advice I can offer for when you have a large project: Save often and create your own library of project file backups using the Save As command frequently, say, 4 times per day. 

Most of my colleagues in the editing field rely on Auto Save less, and their own set of discrete backups more. Personally, I have both Auto Save set up fairly aggressively and my own set of backups. If my Auto Save folder fails, then you have that second set of backups. Thirdly, I backup these discrete files once a day to the Cloud in case my computer gets destroyed (I live in CA, where computers can get involved in natural disasters).

I mentioned this earlier , but one final piece of advice is to make sure that Auto Save is functioning to also create a back up to your Creative Cloud folder via Auto Save preferences. This has saved several customers I've helped out over the years.

Five hours of work is a hard amount of time to lose. I am sorry. The larger and longer you've been working on a project, the more apt it is to create problems for you, particularly, if you've updated the project file across versions, etc.

I hope you can recover from this crash in short order. Good luck. If you have a crash report I can share with engineering, please attach it.

Sincerely,
Kevin

[Michael Grenadier]

Try ejecting the media drive and see if the project will open without the media online.  If so, post back and we can try and help dig yourself out of this hole.

[sarah69841986]

As a Follow-Up, I had to rebuild this project from scratch, it was not re-coverable. Looks like a Warp Stabilizer on one of the clips corrupted and that's what caused the crash and subsuequent corruptions.

[MyerPj]

Lately I've been putting my warp clips into AE and doing them there, then exporting a Cineform or ProRes file (intermediate) and putting that into PP. This started in earnest when I saw how the file sizes of my PP project jump incredibly when you use warp. All the warp information is stored in the PP project. I don't know who came up with that idea, but I imagine it was someone seeing if it (warp) would work, and by the time they got it working, everything had been saved into the project and they went with it! Personally I think the warp info should be stored in a file next to the clip or. Like proxies or meta data, etc...

You might upvote this thread, it already has 599 votes and is "under review":

https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/forums/911233-premiere-pro/suggestions/34068925-warp-stabilizer