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Why does Premiere lose the link to my media files?
I have Premiere Pro 1.5. I have five external USB hard drives hooked up to my laptop (I keep adding more as I run out of hard drive space). I do an occasional video for my church. It seems that if I leave a project for a few months and come back and open it, Premiere loses the links to all the media files. The dialog box opens and asks “Where is the File ‘?'”. I go through and find each file and click select, then the project opens and works just fine. Premiere does not lose the link if I open the project within days or weeks of my last session. But if I wait a few months or years, the link is gone. The longer I wait to open the project, the more files that have lost the link. And yes, I am careful to save a project before closing it.
This was midly annoying for the first few years, but now I have terabytes of capacity, dozens of old project files with hundreds of subfolders that the media could be hidden inside, and it can take over an hour to find all the files I need. Why does Premiere keep losing the link? I am careful not to move the files around on the hard drives. Is it because the drives are external or USB? Is there a better way of relinking the files?
Is there a better way of searching my hard drives for the files? I installed Google desktop search in the hopes that I could type in the file Premiere wants and it would tell me where it is located. That doesn’t seem to work. Premiere “Find” doesn’t work either. It just pulls up Windows Desktop Search which never finds the file. Any suggestions?
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2 Replies
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Do each of your drives have a unique drive letter? If you have not assigned a drive letter to each drive and been careful not to use the same letter more that once this can happen. When you plug a drive in to the USB hub without a drive letter assigned, the computer just gives it the next available name at the time (D,E,F,etc). For example, if the last time you used a project the drive was automatically assigned E and now you plug it in and the drive is assigned the letter F, Premiere will look in the E drive for the files and not find them.
I have several external USB drives and they stay straight for me most of the time. It seem that even when a unique drive letter is assigned if I plug the drive into the hub at a different location I might get this problem, but I’m not sure.
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Ok, I researched how to set the drive letters. Let’s hope that works. It sure would explain both the issue of re-linking and why desktop search could never find my files. Thanks for the help!
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