FAQ:How do I recover a corrupt project?


 * Try importing the corrupt project into a new project.
 * Try all of the auto-saved projects. Details are in the Premiere Pro Help.
 * Make sure that you didn't change the drive letter of the drive containing the project and media clips. It should have the same letter at all times.
 * To determine whether or not the project is corrupt, Wil Renczes said:
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 * Here's what I'd suggest: let's figure out first of all whether the project itself is screwed up or not.

If you have all your media on a particular drive, try creating a new folder and moving everything inside it. (This will make Premiere ask you to locate all the media files when you reload the project.) Then, make a copy of the prproj file, open the copy, and choose 'Offline all' when you get prompted for the location of the various clips.

If you still crash, well, the project is corrupted. If not, then it's probably related to a particular piece of media. You can then try to relink your clips in the project window one at a time until you find the problematic clip.
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 * editART said:

 Thanx to Randy McWilson for the method on howto fix the problem with corrupted files. Here is Randy´s reply to me with the procedure on how to fix the corrupt Premiere Pro project files :

"The way that we discovered to fix a corrupt file (at least the ones we have found) is to use a freeware program called XML Wrench. Do a google search for it and download it.

Use it to open the corrupt file.

Go to the tools menu in XML Wrench and perform a 'Check is well formed'.

It will find the errors, and you have to delete the corrupt info one error at a time. It took us about 20 minutes to fix one file.

Usually you will find garbage data in between some XML fields like this &lt;NAME&gt;&$d.~&lt;/NAME&gt;. We just had to delete the 'garbage' data, but we left the open and close tags (NAME /NAME)

It is VERY important that once you fix all of the errors, when you save, do a : SAVE AS "(project name).prproj"

IF you do not name the extension '.prproj' then Premiere wont recognize it."

Thanx for this Randy, it helped me alot and hope it works for you other people. Of course there is no guarantee it will work in all cases but its worth a try.


 * Once I found the problem, I used the "Replace" function to find and replace the problem - Thanks a lot for this precious info!

Can someone please advise - why on EARTH we should have to download XML Wrench and manually fix a corrupt Adobe project??? This is something common to all the Adobe "Support" forums on issues like this, and the many others that plague Adobe's product (and I'm not being a mindless troll - I've been forced to use it for years so I do know the usability and other issues it has): it seems that people are excited because they've found a "fix" (which is more like a work-around) - purely because they're understandably ecstatic that all their hard work isn't comPLETEly lost.

However, Adobe should be making sure their product isn't so buggy! This issue should be fixed (as just one example). Adobe should be finding out what causes the corruption in the first place and fixing it. And whether it's some other codec on the system that's caused it is no excuse - their software should have better error management built into it. I've seen other issues where an Adobe support representative has happily replied: "oh, that's a known issue since version [3 versions back] - don't worry, most users are aware of the work around for it: just select and move all of the items in your timeline each time you open the project and you'll be fine!"

I'm sorry to rant on - but can some other users please explain the above to me? (i.e. why aren't more people annoyed about this and complaining to Adobe to fix these things)

Bill Hunt added:

Dennis Radke of Adobe offered these tips for recovering a Project that will not open:


 * Try clearing your prefshttp://blogs.adobe.com/genesisproject/2009/11/having_weird_behavior_with_an.html
 * Cleaning your media cache (preferences)
 * Allow the conforming of your project to complete
 * Open up one of your autosaves (if you have that feature turned on)
 * Open up a new project and then import the old project (or key sequence) into it.
 * Open an autosave, save it (different name..duh) and try opening (formerly corrupted) file. (Premiere 6)