Team Project randomly unlinks media?

Report · Jun 13, 2018

I'm doing my first big project with a team of editors. I'm running Premiere Pro cc 2018 on a Mac w/Sierra. We've been pulling clips for the last few days and all seemed fine.

An hour ago, all the media for a particular day became unlinked. All the drives are readable, no system change, just opened the sequence and it was all unlinked.

This file was originally converted (via cut and paste) from a single user Premiere file to a Team Project. As a test, I opened the original single-user file and all the media remained linked.

What's worse, is when I try to re-link all the footage, the 'automatically find other media' choice doesn't seem to be working. I need to manually go into and out of dozens of folders on the hard drive to re-link video/audio files.

When I open the team project, all the assets seem to load correctly (there are no notices about missing media).

What is happening here, and how to I fix it? It wouldn't be so bad if I could just highlight all the media, link one and it would find the rest. However, doing this one by one will take hours... and given there's no indication why they became unlinked, I'm loath to relink it all manually.

Any help/assistance would be appreciated.

Here is the sequence in the single-user Premiere from 06-11-2018

Here is the same sequence in the Team Project version:

Report · Jun 13, 2018

Added bit of info I'm sure is helpful...

I've just re-opened the project and gotten a load of notices like this:

Any idea how to resolve this?

Report · Jun 16, 2018

What version of Premiere pro are you running? We ran into the same problem and after spending a good bit of time on the phone with Adobe, they recommended rolling back to version 12.1.0 - that solved the problem for us. We had to relink everything one time after the roll back but not again since. You just have to be sure not to inadvertently update through the desktop app. They did say that there should be a fix (the problem is apparently a known bug in this update) sometime in the next 30 days.

One other note - the Team project will not give you the option to locate a file and have the program autosearcch for all other files in that location - you have to relink them all individually.

Hope that helps

M

Report · Jun 24, 2018

Hey Pixipixr,

Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately relinking the whole project is not workable. I eventually relinked the 200 items in question and thankfully the problem never returned. But as the project has over 2000 assets, I'm of course nervous of this hitting at random again.

I think I will roll back to 12.1.0 to see if that helps some other issues as well.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Report · Jun 29, 2018

I'm having the exact same issues as above. Start my project as a Team Project and then after a week or so decided to save as an offline solo project. Everything was working fine, finished my project, saving every 30 minutes as I went, that was until yesterday when I went to export the 1hr 40m project and it crashed about an hour into the export. I reopened the project to find everything is offline, and instead of just re-linking one of the files and then having Premiere auto re-link everything else, I get this stupid LocatorID issue.

The only current solution I have is to relocate every single individual file, this is beyond a joke, it's an 1h 40m DVD for a Premier League Football Club, it's deadline is Monday, I simply do not have the time to sit here and re-link everything tiny bit of Media. To say I'm angry would be the understatement of the century!

This issue has been reported since May. GET IT SORTED!!

Report · Jun 29, 2018

If it's any consolation jamesh16694669, there's a team of editors in California feeling your pain.

Since I made this post, and while I like the theory of Teams, in practice we have found it unusable. Another issue in 12.1.1 lead us to having over 30 minutes of waiting while opening team projects, and memory errors until we had to abandon the Team project and go back to managing with solo projects.

Adobe, we love your ambition, but editing with Team projects in 2018 is like dealing with the issues of Premiere 4 or 3 in the era of the 4:3 to 16:9 switchover. It's made me realize how sterling and robust Premiere has become in the last few years by reminding me how bad it can get.

I hope to circle back to Teams some day. Would love to be part of a users group to talk to Adobe's Teams... well, team.

Report · Jul 04, 2018

This is really ridiculous! We could not avoid this issue even switching to SOLO BEFORE we faced this issue. We noticed random files getting offline when opening the solo project. You fix one pack of files and getting a new pack on re-opening.

Report · Jul 04, 2018

Looks like it's true that Premiere mess up File Name and Path. As you open 'Link media' you see locatorID in File Name column. When you click Locate, locatorID appears in 'Last Path'.

I am thrilled. Get me a time machine please!

Report · Jul 04, 2018

Maybe I'm slow on the uptake. Does this last posting about File Name and Last Path provide an answer to fixing it? Or simply a diagnosis to help Adobe patch it?

Report · Jul 04, 2018

No, sorry. Basically this is a hint for Adobe team. I am still trying to find a workaround.

Report · Jul 04, 2018

No apologies needed. This is probably some important info for them to fix it eventually.
You're paying attention, right Adobe?

Report · Jul 05, 2018

So I eventually had to re-link every single file. Took me absolutely days. I will NEVER EVER use Team Projects again. Absolutely nightmare.

Report · Jul 05, 2018

One of our editors reported she notices random files become offline even on solo projects after full manual relink.

Report · Jul 05, 2018

Try the following steps:
1. Create a brand new offline project
2. Drag the old project file into the new offline project

3. Re-link all the offline media.

I did the above and never had any offline issues after that.

Report · Apr 27, 2019

I am getting a similar, if not the same, problem in the 2019 version (v13) of premiere.

Randomly while editing, and usually just when I do something, everything goes offline. No problems are reported in the media manager and I can't use it to relink anything. I just wait, and over the course of 5 or 10 mins, everything slowly starts to come online again, clip by clip, all by itself.

Report · Apr 29, 2019

Based on your description, this sounds like a different issue that what's been discussed in the rest of this thread. Is it possible that more than one person is logged in with the same Creative Cloud login ID at the same time and has the same Team Project open? That can cause some unexpected issues similar to what you're describing.

If not, what sort of storage are you using? Is it possible that drives are coming on and off line? One of the ways that Team Projects are different from standalone projects is that Team Project periodically scan all mounted volumes looking for media that matches what's in your open Team Projects. If something about your setup confused that scanning logic, that might potentially cause media to go temporarily offline, then come back online once it rediscovered the media files. For example, if there were copies of the same media on two drives, and one of them became disconnected. It would normally discover and link to the duplicate media in less than 5-10 minutes, though.

Report · May 09, 2019

I've not had it repeat the issue and so I can't remember exactly what we were doing. It was a unique CC login ID. It may have been that some of the media was on shared storage that we have now separated out as that was causing other issues with .pek files.

Report · May 10, 2023

Still happens in 2023

Report · May 11, 2023

@callumycallumycallumy During which workflow are you encountering files going offline? Files going offline can happen for various reasons.

Best,
Udo

Udo Pawlik | Sr Software Product Quality Specialist | Adobe | upawlik@adobe.com

Report · Jan 25, 2025

Hey all!

I seem to have encountered the same problem. First time using Teams with another editor. I set up project, passed it over, for an edit now picking back up. It was working for a good few hours then had a load of Medialocator resource errors pop up. just closed it and all was unlinked. Went to re-link and there is no filepath present (where it would normally be there).

I re-linked 1 clip and usually all would re-link from there, but no luck. I do 100 or so re-links just to finish a deadline, but I have 100's more to relink and hoping there is a way of fixing this without manually doing all these re-links (and then hoping it does not happen again of course).

Any helo much appreciated :).

Ta,

Paloma

Report · Jan 25, 2025

FYI I opened a new offline project, pasted the clips into a new sequence, went to re-link from this and got this in file name (still no file path). Tried relinking and only does individually still.

Report · Jan 27, 2025

Hi @palomaq68930646,
Sorry for your troubles.

Which Product(s) and version(s) are you running?
How many collaborator work in your Team Project?

Did you initially import the media in the Team Project or some else?
How do you share the media with other collaborators (e.g. Shared location, external drive, file sharing app)?
How was the relinking achieved on the other editors machine?
Does each collaborator have a separate Creative Cloud license?

Report · Jan 28, 2025

Hey Udo,

Thanks for the reply and appreciate your help. Answers below:

Which Product(s) and version(s) are you running? - Premier Pro 25.1
How many collaborator work in your Team Project? - 2 collaborators (myself as owner and one other invited

Did you initially import the media in the Team Project or some else? - I imported footage
How do you share the media with other collaborators (e.g. Shared location, external drive, file sharing app)? I believe I hosted the footage on Google drive to start and linked to that, but both our timelines were laggy, so we both downloaded footage independently and re-linked to our offline footage
How was the relinking achieved on the other editors machine? - Started with G Drive linked, but then moved offline when timeline was lagging, mainly due to audio caching?
Does each collaborator have a separate Creative Cloud license? - Yes

Let me know if you need any more info!

Ta,

Paloma

Report · Jan 30, 2025

Generally when working in Team Projects you should avoid 'Make offline' before relinking media as this changes the media path globally for every collaborator. The best option to re-link missing media files would be via the 'Media Management' dialog as this will create a machine specific path to the media which is not shared.

Media mapping using Media Management