Can’t access files on one of my HD’s

[Angelo Lorenzo]

My bet is that it’s hitting a corrupt file. I assume you’re just flipping open the drive and it crashes on the top directory?

Try these two things:

1) Does dragging a file deeper in one of the folders from the drive into the bin of Premiere work without issue?

2) What if you “sanitize” the drive by putting any files that are top level into a folder, can you drill down into other folders using Media Browser?

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Angelo Lorenzo

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[Paul Neumann]

Have you added any folders (probably at the Finder level) to the root level of the drive recently? Not only a good place to start narrowing down the problem files, but it could be confusing the Media Browser operation. Don’t usually see this in PPro, but I had an instance where I added a DCIM folder of some RAW stills to a drive and at that point FCPX would not see the drive. It would load it, show it to me and then just disappear. Once I moved that folder inside another folder the drive and all its media could be seen.

[Larry Asbell]

If there are any punctuation characters in the drive name or in the top level file names, try eliminating them. It’s hard to get a definitive list of the illegal ones and some are OK in one OS or app and not in another. But certainly eliminate these:

/ : * ? ” < > |

I think these may be a problem in some cases:

, ! { } [ ] % @ # $

also avoid long file names, not sure of the number of characters, maybe around 30.

[Dave Morrison]

Paul, I’m adding and deleting folders from most of my drives all the time, but it only seems to be the “Storage” drive that is causing PP and Prelude to hang.

[Dave Morrison]

Thanks for those suggestions, but I don’t find any of the illegal symbols in any of my folder names.

[Dave Morrison]

[Angelo Lorenzo] “1) Does dragging a file deeper in one of the folders from the drive into the bin of Premiere work without issue?”

If I understand your question correctly, yes. Using the Mac’s Finder window, I dragged a video file into the Project window directly from the “Storage” hard drive and it worked fine. But, as soon as I touched the “Storage” icon in the Media Browser, the lockup happens. Weird, huh?

[Larry Asbell]

I think what Angelo Lorenzo was getting at when he suggested to:

“‘sanitize’ the drive by putting any files that are top level into a folder”

is that when you attempt to access the drive, the system has to look at every file on the root level of the drive in order to show you a directory of its content. In your case it’s failing to do that, maybe because of a problem file at the top level of the directory. So try making its job real easy by making a new folder and putting in it all the individual files on the top level of the drive. I guess you should also check that you don’t have any “twirled down” folders and that your finder view is in list, not column view.

[Dave Morrison]

Thanks for clarifying that for me, Larry. To your points, I “sanitized” the directory by deleting the 3 files that have been there since 2009 (not video related files, btw) and that didn’t change anything. Also, there were no “twirled down” folders and putting Finder into “List View” didn’t change anything either. Frankly, I’ve used Column View since I’ve used Macs and I can’t imagine how the View Preference in the Mac Finder would affect a separate program like PPro. I’ve been using PPro just fine for the past 12 months. This problem only started a week or two ago.

[Larry Asbell]

Dave –

In no way did I mean that there’s anything wrong with twirling down folders. Only that in the moment of your test when you’re trying to limit what the media browser sees, it might help. But now that I try it here I see that in any case the Media Browser always re-opens with nothing twirled down.

The next thing I’d test for is if there are stored settings or cache files that PPr accesses at that time that are corrupt. Go into a different user on your Mac, open Premiere there, create a new project and try to Media Browse that drive. If this works, you’ll know you’ve got some caches or preferences in your user that you’ve got to trash.

The only other thing that I can think of is to start with a fresh initialized drive and copy over the contents of the Storage drive little by little, trying Media Browser between each batch.

[Dave Morrison]

Larry, thanks SO much for your interest in my problem. I spent the evening on the phone with Adobe and the solution was something a bit odd. Turns out the PPro (and Prelude) don’t care for a “BPAV” folder sitting in the root of my Storage drive. This is the folder that comes directly out of my Sony EX1 camera. I’m not even sure how this one folder got there as I usually bury them inside of a client’s project folder. The tech also said that PPro didn’t like folders labeled in all caps, either. However, since I have several folders labeled that way across all my drives, that particular quirk doesn’t appear to be widespread.

Anyway, I can now read the Storage drive from the Media Browser but I may test this “BPAV” folder issue by dropping the same folder in the roots of all my drives to see if they quit responding.

Again, thanks SO much for your interest and help.
Dave