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Help! – Relinking renamed files
Quick backstory: Back at the end of 2019, two videographers from my office went to the country of Benin in Africa to capture some footage for a project we are doing and came back with multiple hours worth of footage. I took that footage and edited together a Selects/Best of sequence picking out the best shots from all that they captured for easier editing in the future. I made the mistake when editing of just using all the clips with their original file names straight out of camera. In an attempt to be more organized, we are trying to rename all our International footage with a set naming convention, EG: Benin2019_0095.MP4, Ethiopia2018_4132.mp4, etc.
I knew that because this footage had already beed used in a Premiere project, it would be a big mistake to rename all the files now and break all the links so I did some research beforehand and found this article that suggested doing a batch rename in Bridge and checking the box to “Preserve current filename in XMP metadata”: http://tinyurl.com/3psvme7r
Unfortunately, this did not seem to work and now all the links in my timeline are broken. Is there any reasonable solution to relinking renamed files or am I just out of luck?
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4 Replies
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Sorry about your problem – sounds extremely frustrating.
What we do is back up our original camera files in three places..when the project is finished we purge 2 of the 2 back-ups, but keep #3 indefinitely – partially because of issues like what you’re describing – but mostly becasue a client may want a revision someday.
If by any chance you have a set of the original files, bring them into your computer and have Premiere link to those files instead of the renamed files, and you might be in luck.
Otherwise, unfortunately you may have to choose between 2 tough options – manually renaming the clips, or starting the project over.
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When our company renames files, we usually leave the original out-of-camera file number as the last part of the name. Have you done this in your example–where “0095” in “Benin2019_0095.MP4” is the original number? If so, you could manually replace the files based on the number …it’s still manual, but at least you’re not working in the dark.
If no part of the original file name has been preserved, then all you have to go by would perhaps be file number order and your memory of which shots you used in the edit. You can leave the new file names, and manually re-link your edited clips to the files… but you’d have to visually confirm each of your replacement choices.
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So when I checked the box in Bridge to “Preserve current filename in metadata”, what did this do? Is there any way to find the original filename that way? Better yet would be if there is any way to get Premiere to see the Preserved filename somehow.
On the plus side, I do have an exported version of my timeline that I can view in Quicktime to help me remember visually what files go where in the timeline.
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Problem solved!
Although to be fully honest, I’m not sure how I solved it. I began the very tedious process of relinking files one by one to the new filenames and then, midway through this process, I relinked one of the clips and all the rest of them suddenly came back online. I’m not really sure how this happened, but I am so glad to know that I don’t have to manually relink every clip individually.
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