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Margaret Artola/3 min read

Reconnecting Missing Media Files in Premiere Pro

Media Reconnection Workflow

1

Identify Missing

Red bars in timeline; offline icon in Project panel.

2

Right-Click > Link Media

Or Edit > Link Media for selected clips.

3

Browse to File

Navigate to where the file actually lives now.

4

Apply to All

Toggle 'Find Match' to auto-link other missing files in same folder.

Master Premiere Pro at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Video Editing & Motion Graphics Certificate teaches Premiere Pro alongside After Effects.

In this video, we'll learn the different ways to reconnect your media through re-linking.

It is common and easy for your media to suddenly go “offline”. When this happens you must reconnect your media.

Video Transcription

Hi, this is Margaret with Noble Desktop. Today, we're going to look at reconnecting media. I'm opening up a project and I can see that a ton of media is offline. Why is this media offline? The worst case scenario would be if it was deleted accidentally, but most of the time it's simply because you've moved it from one folder to another or put it on an external hard drive. Anything like that will disrupt the media path of your footage and make you reconnect it.

I'm going to let it find it for me. It already found one and reconnected these up here. Now I have all of these to deal with, so I'm going to say locate, search. Found some more, another group. Locate, search. File not found. It's not in that area, so I'm going to assume that I've moved it to the desktop with some other in this broad folder, and have it search in there. File not found. Let's look under Documents. Noble search, found.

Okay, there's a bunch more that needs to be relocated and I do think that in this case, it's the fact that I moved many things into a folder. So I'm going to let it find quite a bit. Now there's only these other levels there, so I'm just going to say offline, offline, and then the project will open. This intro right here is offline and I just happen to remember reading that, so I'm going to say, "Locate. Try intro, extro." I'm going to think this isn't there. Okay, it reconnected it right here and I'm purposely going to put something offline. I'm going to find this clip, reveal and find her. This is here. I'm going to move it and take this one off too. I've just moved those offline.

If you have offline footage on your timeline, which at some point you absolutely will, you would select both clips (or however many clips are offline) and control-click and say, "Link media." It took me to the two offline files that I've indicated, and I could either say, "Use Media Browser to locate this, " or uncheck that. I'm going to keep it checked and say, "Locate." It took me right to the place that it used to be. I know where it is because I just put it in the documents folder, so I could just click on one of these and it'll reconnect. Now both of them are reconnected.

You're going to have to reconnect any offline media before you export. If media is offline and you export your movie, you're going to have a big red file that says, "Media Offline." I hope you've enjoyed this lesson on reconnecting media. This has been Margaret with Noble Desktop.