Adobe Premiere Pro Cannot Link Familiar File with 2/1 Audio Channels

[FrostWritten]

Hi there. I'm re-editing a video project in Adobe Premiere Pro that I haven't touched since 2018. Premiere has undergone some updates since then.

All my files are exactly where and how I left them, on this project has its own secure external drive.

However, two of my video files will not load correctly.

When I open the project, it says for each of these two video files, "The selected file cannot be linked because it has 1 audio channel(s) and the clip was created with 2 audio channel(s) with a different channel type."

Please help me. I have no idea why it's doing this or how to fix it. Every file is the same as it was before.

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[jasontcox]

I know this isnt a perfect answer, but if it's only 2 clips, can you manually re-import them (not relink, just important the current versions you have as though they were new clips) and then just manually swap out the two clips in the timeline?

[FrostWritten]

Yeah unfortunately, that's the only solution I've come up with, as well. The problem with that is I can't see exactly which parts of those video files I cut. I have a rough idea, but it won't be the same.

It's frustrating that Adobe would release an update that makes their own files unusable, and not bother to fix or even directly address the issue.

I appreciate the help, though.

[Sasha_L]

Any more insights into this, as I have hundreds of clips like that?  I am in a major stress over this issue - I basically consolidated the project onto another hard drive that I need to give away for further editing, but now I keep getting the same message and have no clue how to relink the proxy media.  

I even tried to force relinking to the original, 4K media, but the same message appears.

[daniel5C6C]

I had the same problem and I had the project on an external hard drive. The problem with relinking proxies was that premiere learnt the path of the project was on H: drive. After some days I opened it again, but with different letter drive (L:), and that was the problem even it was the same external hard drive! So the solution is just to change the letter of the hard drive to the original one (in my case it was H:). There are several tutorials on youtube how to do it.

[cameronv28396853]

Same problem here.

I can't believe how basic this issues is and that Adobe has not fixed it yet.

What is the point of having proxies if you can't hand off a drive to editor or take your drive and edit on a different computer?

Adobe at its best. 

[scotta20529542]

How this is not fixed is baffling. What an absolute joke.

[Timothy Episode1]

I just had a similar but slightly different project. I'm using Premiere Essentials though.

I was using the "replace footage" option since I had made some edits to a video file outside of Premiere and wanted to replace all of my clips in Premiere with the new version without taking an hour to do it manually. That error popped up because I was originally using a .wmv video file and was trying to swap with a .avi file. Silly mistake on my part, but replacing the original video with another .wmv file worked.

It probably won't work, but make a new copy of your video files with the same file extension of the original. Right click the video file in the Project Assets bin, chooose "replace footage," navigate to the new cop of the video file, and see if Premiere will load it. If that doesn't work, maybe use Adobe Media Encoder to convert the file to another format. I dunno, good luck.