Working with lost missing offline videos in Premiere Pro

Hi everyone, this video is about File Management, and what happens when this big red scary box with all these languages on appears. We'll cover what to do when you delete it, rename it, move it, we'll go and find footage. I can tell you're excited for this one; File Management. Let's do it anyway. 

All right, the next thing that's going to cause you problems, not problems, just good to know, is when you mess around the leading footage. So I've got my project here, there's my Premiere Pro file. You can see it's quite small, 43 Megabytes, Kilobytes even. It stays nice and small by actually just linking to this footage. It doesn't actually bring it inside itself like, something like Microsoft Word or Photoshop, where it kind of like draws it into the one file, just links to them. 

What happens though, if you delete one of these files it's trying to link to, let's say for instance I deleted it by accident, and I come in here and it freaks out, and goes, this window up here is the big red scary thing, and lots of languages appears. It's going to say, "I'm missing this file." You're going to say-- let's say we've deleted it and we didn't mean to. 

What I'm going to do is-- I can't go and locate it because it's binned. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to offline it all. Now I need to go back and just find it. Undelete that file, or get it off the network drive that I left it on, or my USB stick, put it back where Premiere Pro can get it. It's not clever enough to go and find it, I can right click it. It will go and find it, you can either, you just have to turn Premiere Pro off and on again, and it will link to it again. Let's go to 'Replace Footage'. Let's go to you, and all's well in the world again. 

All right, let's do another for instance. Let's say that I'm bringing in footage, just to kind of test it, I was like, "I wonder if this will work." I'm going to bring in something that I was messing around with. I brought that in and I kind of played with it, this is me talking. The beginning of this video, I was just checking, it looked all good. I do this all the time, I'm like checking out, I'm like, "Yeah, that looks cool," or "I don't need that anymore," and I'm going to go to my files and there it is there, I'm going to delete it. Then this thing goes, freaked out. So I've deleted it on purpose, and I just forgot I had it anywhere. 

So I'm going to go offline all, and I'm going to do this, I'm going to say, you, I can trash you, what is it, 'Del' on my keyboard, get rid of it, because I don't want it on here, I just, was like a test, I was just checking it, but Premiere Pro says, if it just deletes, that's great, it hasn't been used anywhere. If this pops up, it says, "Hey, you're deleting something that actually is being used in one of your sequences." "Would you still like to delete it?", and that's when you kind of take pause and go, "Actually, I don't realize I was using that somewhere." And you need to go and look in your sequence to see where it is. I'm like, "Yep, I don't mind, go away," and it deletes it from both the Timeline and your Project Window. 

Next issue, is renaming stuff. So you're going to kind of record it, it's going to come through as like, what if your camera records it in, and you want to kind of maybe, you know, name it nicely. So let's say I go in here and I need to call this one v1. Same problem's going to happen here, it's going to freak out. The red bar's going to appear at the back here. It's going to say, what would you like to do? Let's say that we-- you can do it from here, straight here, or let's say you do offline it. Let's find the big red bar. You can see in here, it's question mark. 

The same kind of principle as deleting it, doesn't know where it is. What we're going to do, is slightly differently, is right click it and go to 'Replace Footage', and say, actually this is it. Where are you? That one there. It connects it back up again. So renaming will freak it out, so just be careful of that. 

Next thing that is less weird and more helpful, is where I go and move footage, so let's say that I, I'm in here and I've got it all messy and I need to start, some kind of folder structure, I'm going to put in my footage, and I go and move 01 XD in there. The cool thing about Premiere Pro, goes, it kind of had a little twitch here, but I went and found it. It seems to only work if it's kind of like, near the program-- the Premiere Pro file, and kind of deeper, it doesn't seem to work as well, or at all. 

I haven't put that-- I don't know exactly how this works, but if I go and stick it on my desktop it goes too far, can't find, back to the crazy red box. So if you're moving it-- I imagine it's just kind of like from the route, to where the file is, all the way through to kind of other boxes, it seems to work just fine. So I'm going to-- just know that. So you can rearrange without having to relink, but if you go too far freaks out. 
Last tip in terms of this file management, let's just say that you've got footage and it's all moved-- so I'm going to hit 'Cancel'. Let's go to this one that says, this one here, I'm going to put them all on the desktop, and they're all going to freak out. Let's say I left them at work on a network drive, or on a USB stick, and it's going to go, "Ah." You don't want to have to go and find each individual ones of these, or right click them and relink footage. What you can do is, let's say that later on, you know-- I can't, man, I'm just going to cancel that. And what you can do is just put them back where it got it. Everything can go back in there. Get one back as well. And what we can do is, in here, instead of having to try and relink them, right click, Link to Footage, or doing any sort of other thing, just go to 'File', 'Close Project'. Yes, I'm saving it. Then open it up again, and Premiere Pro is pretty good, and goes, when it opens it goes and tries to search for them all, and just kind of cuts down your time having to go search for them. 

All right, that is kind of it for the File stuff. You'll end up moving things around or losing them, and seeing that red screen all the time. One last thing is quite helpful when you're dealing with footage, let's say I do move it, and I'm like, it's going to desktop, and I don't know where it is. It's on my machine somewhere, I go to 'Offline', I don't know where it is, I can right click it, and say, actually let's go and replace the footage. Actually we're going to link the footage, and in here we can do a search. 

So I can say I want to find this one here, I'm going to go to 'Locate', and this window here is, if you're like, "Man, this is really hard to use," it is, I hate this window. I just use a Finder window, like everyone else. Yours might be on this as well, so I'm going to go to List View. What I want to do is kind of give it a help, I'm going to say, look, I'm in my hard drive somewhere, and I want you to display only the ones that have the exact match, because that's all I'm looking for. Hit 'Search', and it will find it, it is there, hello, click on it, click 'OK'. The cool thing about it is if you're missing other ones, it will automatically go and find those at the same time. So if you do miss one, you don't know where it is, use the Link Media, and then use Locate. 

All right, that is enough about File Management. Let's get back into some of the more exciting things in Premiere Pro.