Missing XMP files and looking for potential solutions

[Ht Davis]

Premiere will re-generate them, but it will also save that location in the xml file, and attempt to re-read them. You must have the option to write them checked in preferences.

Make sure you’re working from a drive with the right filesystem and permissions settings.

With flash cards or externals this is a common issue, along with needing to relink files when they show up on the system under different names (letter on windows or volume location on mac\linux). If you’re sure this is not the case with your system, run drive maintenance, you may have some bad blocks or maybe a drive is failing. Make sure your drive is set to a format that doesn’t use a Permissions structure or to a format that matches your system drive and you have full access to. The XMP files should show up right next to your imported files in the system. Check that as well. If they don’t, then they weren’t written or they were trashed. If you trash them, this dialogue will show up often. They may be hidden, so show your hidden files to be sure. If they are simply not written, you are having other problems. Probably a formatting or write permissions issue. Make sure the drive is not locked (some flash cards have a lock or cameras allow you to lock the files to prevent deletion, you need to remove those to link the xmp sidecar files to in the header).

I know that’s a lot of info to hash through… …But I hope it helps.

[Scott Barnes]

If the student comes back in I will see what drive format they have. What they ended up doing was actually starting a new project then relinking all there files. It was a bit of a pain but got it to go away.

I am not bound by what is possible.

[Ht Davis]

If it was an HDD, a bad block may be the culprit (these have actual spinning magnetic plates and they do get some areas on the plate that begin to lose magnetic cohesion or the mag-signal deteriorates from moving the drive around near EM sources). IF a flash drive or SSD, you’re looking at some possible format corruption, or even a burnout transistor (the last one is similar to a bad block, but is a physical burnout of a transistor, making it useless, whereas some simple magnetic drop can be re-magged by some software tools that will repeatedly zap the section to rebuild the magnetic properties; the first is more a software type problem, referring to the files that define the drive for the operating system). If you haven’t guessed, I used to do some light IT work for a few offices, mostly freelance repair and recovery.

When They’re finished with the project, have them back it all up, and then attempt to run a check disk in windows, or a volume repair on mac. This will at least tell you something about the drive, and should fix most smaller problems. The larger ones will show up, and you should get an idea of what they are. If this occurs and the repair won’t work, try reformatting the drive and run the repair again. If the drive is still physically functional, it should just pass the testing phase and finish. IF the drive has hardware issues that are more a “time to get a new drive” kind of problem, it will fail the repair again or fail to format.