Posted by Richard Crowley on 01/22/08 16:37

"EJ" wrote ...
> "Richard Crowley" wrote:
>> "EJ" wrote...
>> >> After rescuing my computer (and large Premier 6.5 project)
>> >> from a crash, I find that the project is intact -ALMOST.
>> >> Everything is there in the time-line except that 3 of the four
>> >> original large avi files, and their edited pieces on the time-line
>> >> have turned intoblackholes.
>>
>> > SOLUTION:
>> > During computer recovery, Windows had renamed three of
>> > the drive letters. The video wanted to be on the drive (letter)
>> > on which it had been captured. When I Re-renamed the drives,
>> > the video all appeared again as normal.
>>
>> Alternate solution: When you open the project and Premiere
>> asks you where are the files it can't find, you just re-direct it
>> to the new locations. No fooling around with drive letters
>> needed. IME, Premiere has no preset expectations about
>> where it "wants" files to be. You, the end-user, can specify
>> them wherever you fancy.
>
> No, sorry, that wasn't quite the problem and isn't quite the solution.
> After recovering from the crash, I did of course tell Premier where
> the files were on the Windows-renamed discs. The entire 2-hour project
> then reappeared complete with all clips, cuts, transitions etc in
> place on the time-line, _except_ that 3 quarters of the video was
> just pieces of black. It was not until I re-renamed the drives that
> the video reappeared. As I needed a couple of attempts to get the
> original drive letters correct, I was able to see video reappear and
> some also disappear (ie become black) when I initially got it wrong.
> I dont take credit for this; I got the clue from a 2003 post in
> another forum which said words to the effect that "clips want to be on
> the drive on which they were originally captured". His solution was to
> edit information in the first few lines of the clip's raw data to
> comply with the drive that the clip now found itself in, but not being
> brave enough for that I decided to try altering the drive letters
> instead which, happily, worked.

I regularly use external drives (raw disk drives, no case) and
those IDE to USB2 cables to store video that I am editing.
Windows frequently uses different drive letters depending on
what else is connected at the moment. My experience has been
that Premiere doesn't care where the files are as long as it knows
the path to them. And if a file isn't in the same place as last time,
it stops and asks you where it went. I've never seen Premiere
know (or care) what drive they were "originally captured" to.
Dunno why that is even important. A file is a file.

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