Settings not saving

[RBM]

I’m having difficulty with a 19 minute project of footage I recently shot of my two grandsons water skiing. The footage was the first taken on my new Canon HV 40. I imported the footage into my computer using HDVSplit. My goal was to make the video silly with lots of special effects to amuse the two kids. As I was editing it the day before yesterday, I kept rendering the various effects that I added and the whole project played smoothly.

However, when I opened the project yesterday morning to continue editing, a number of odd things happened. First, as I played through the project, even though the timeline showed icons indicating that all the clips and titles in the movie were present, some didn't appear in the monitor. Instead, the "offline" message played in the monitor until the CTI got to the next functioning clip. When I back-clicked any of these missing sections and clicked “reveal in media,” the program took me to the correct source in the media panel. In point of fact, none of the media was missing; it’s all available in the media panel. In each case, when I dragged any purportedly “missing” clip back into the project, it played immediately.

Second, there are additional clips that played with no indication of “media offline,” but in these cases the keyframed special effects didn’t play. For example, there’s one section where I have two garbage matte layers above the main track. In each, I use the eight point garbage matte to create a passage in which, as my younger grandson skis, a second image of him water skiing first appears on his right and then fades. Closely thereafter, another image of him appears on his left and then disappears. There are very many keyframes involved. Neither keyframed image appeared in the project when I first opened it. I was able to recover both these effects by going into Properties for each, and clicking the Eight-point garbage matte off, then on. This toggling made each effect work again. When I got it working, though, the red line reappeared above each edited clip indicating that it once more needs to be rendered.

I should add that, when I pulled up this project, Premiere didn’t generate the “where is xxxx” screen to relocate unlinked clips. It simply opened with all these misfires in place unbeknownst to the program. In an earlier posting in the forums, Steve recommended saving a skitterish project with a new name. I tried that, but it didn’t cure any of the problems this project is having.

I opened the project again this morning. I had corrected all of the difficulties listed above yesterday. Every last problem is back. As a matter of curiosity, I opened two earlier 15 minute projects with many special effects, etc. shot on my Sony HDR HC3. These are working perfectly.

RBM

Intel R Core TM 2 CPU, 6700 @ 2.66 GHz. 2.77 GHz, 3.0 GB of RAM. Windows XP.

[Steve Grisetti]

How much free, defragmented space is on you C drive?

Also, are you storing this video any place other than your C drive?

[RBM]

Steve,

I have 93G of unfragmented free space on my C drive. I defragment often. The project having difficulty is on a 1T external hard drive. There are several projects on that external hard drive. At the moment, they're all working.


RBM

[Chuck Engels]

How about trying some of the standard stuff;

1. Do a 'Save As' and give the file a new name.
2. Clear cache and preferences.
3. Copy the entire project to a local drive and try running it from there.
4. Delete all preview and cache files.

Sometimes these little tricks fix problems, sometimes they don't, but are always worth a try

[Steve Grisetti]

Also, you say your drive is attached to your computer via USB?

Have you use Windows Disk Management to permanently give the the external drive a drive letter?

If, every time your computer powers up, it has to re-recognize the external drive (or if you disconnect it and then reconnect it to your computer) Premiere Elements can lose track of the links to the video clips on it.

Could that be happening?

[Chuck Engels]

Steve is right, if the computer gives the drive a different letter on occasion that would definitely cause these kinds of problems.

[RBM]

Steve and Chuck,

Thanks for your replies.

Chuck, I did 1,2, and 4 in your first response. None of those moves made any difference. After I tried those, I decided to delete the whole project and start over. I've already redone about a quarter of it, and now it seems to be working. I've shut the computer completely off several times. Each time I restart the computer and restart PE7, the whole project comes up.

Steve, Computer Management calls the external hard drive K and declares it "healthy."

Merely getting in contact with you folks always seems to make things work. Again, thanks.

RBM

[Chuck Engels]

Project file scan get corrupted at times. Are there any auto save files for that project you can open?