Premiere Pro CS3 all audios suddenly lost

[Larry S. evans ii]

Okay, you need to clarify what you mean by “lost”.

If you are getting a “Cannot find file” type of message when opening the project, then most likely the location of the audio files has been changed. If you moved the folder that contained the sound files, Premiere will tell you it can’t find them. You have to open a dialog and link those missing files to wherever you moved them.

This presumes that you have chosen to “offline” the missing files during start up, and not tried to do something else which may result in the files being moved or deleted from the timeline.

If the sound files were on an external drive, CD, or USB drive, then you need to simply re-insert that and open the project again. It will find them (usually) without any problem. Sometimes a USB drive (or other external) can be given a different drive letter on a Windows computer. In this case, you may have to manually relink the files, since Premiere is looking for them at “E:My Soundfiles” and they are now actually at “F:My Soundfiles”. I believe Macs handle file paths to externals a little less haphazardly, so if you are on a Mac this is not the cause of the problem.

If, by some mistake, you deleted the sound files and/or their folder, your only chance is a backup or restore disk that contains them as they were after you made the last edits. There are emergency “undelete” software packages, but they are not 100% and with media files like sound or video they are very unlikely to work.

No, if you simply don’t see the audio track in your timeline it may be possible that you have minimized them or moved them off the screen. If you do a preview of your video and hear the sounds, then they are still there, you may just have hit an odd button or keyboard combination that closed the audio tracks. I’m not aware of this ever happening, but there are some many features in Premiere that I never use in my workflow that it’s possible.

Now, if you have the tracks visible in the timeline, and you have the files in your input bin, but there is no sound, and there are not cuts in the timeline, then the most likely cause is that you failed to save the project after you made the changes, or for some reason Premiere reverted to an earlier saved copy. This is highly unlikely, because obviously if the video cuts you made are still there then the application should have saved everything. Still, if that is the case, there may not be anyway of fixing it, because it’s the result of a freak error that no one ever expects.

I am hoping that this is the first case, and that you simply moved the sound file folder or removed the external drive it was on, and you simply need to relink the files. I have had this sort of thing happen and your first reaction is “What the heck is wrong with this?”
I have two very large external hard drives that I store my working media on. One day, purely by chance, they started up in the opposite order that they usually do, resulting in Windows assigning their drive letters in reverse. EVERY Premiere project I had came up with missing files.

Once I realized what happened, I turned off the computer, restarted the drives in the correct order (waiting for the first to completely boot up before starting the second), and everything returned to normal.

Take a breath, look around, see if you moved something and forgot. Sometimes it’s that simple.

Larry S. Evans II
Executive Producer
Digital I Productions

[Chris Buttacoli]

You can also look at your auto-saved projects and open an earlier version if something did get messed up.